Arachnotronic
Lifer
A long time ago in galaxy far, far away, I built a machine for a buddy of mine. Athlon II X2 3.2GHz, 4GB DDR3, and a GeForce 8800GT.
A couple of weeks ago his 8800GT died and he went ahead and replaced it with a GeForce GTX 960, which is obviously a significant leap in performance. However, it's clear that the old Athlon II X2 is holding his system back in WoW (the main game he's interested in playing).
I kind of want to recommend that he go with a new mobo+cpu+RAM (Skylake Pentium would be a big jump), but that would require a lot of ripping and replacing of components, reinstall of Windows, and so on that he's not really interested in doing and frankly I don't want to do it either unless I have to.
So, what I am thinking is to have him buy a cheap used 4 core Athlon II or 4-6 Phenom II. It's a drop-in replacement into his current system and should offer a big performance leap.
Will a quad core Athlon II/Phenom II bottleneck a GTX 960? Is it worth biting the bullet and upgrading to a more modern platform?
A couple of weeks ago his 8800GT died and he went ahead and replaced it with a GeForce GTX 960, which is obviously a significant leap in performance. However, it's clear that the old Athlon II X2 is holding his system back in WoW (the main game he's interested in playing).
I kind of want to recommend that he go with a new mobo+cpu+RAM (Skylake Pentium would be a big jump), but that would require a lot of ripping and replacing of components, reinstall of Windows, and so on that he's not really interested in doing and frankly I don't want to do it either unless I have to.
So, what I am thinking is to have him buy a cheap used 4 core Athlon II or 4-6 Phenom II. It's a drop-in replacement into his current system and should offer a big performance leap.
Will a quad core Athlon II/Phenom II bottleneck a GTX 960? Is it worth biting the bullet and upgrading to a more modern platform?
