Upgrade advice for friend

[Arachnotronic]

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?

 

[cytg111]

What kind of fps is he getting currently? - Line of thought is "aint broken dont fix it"...

 

[Arachnotronic]

What kind of fps is he getting currently? - Line of thought is "aint broken dont fix it"...

It's definitely too slow for his tastes, which is why he came to me asking for help.

Athlon II X4 is like $30 on eBay and I think it could make a huge difference.

 

[Ketchup]

I like the Phenom II idea. More than 4 cores wouod probably be a waste of money for a gaming rig.

 

[Arachnotronic]

I like the Phenom II idea. More than 4 cores wouod probably be a waste of money for a gaming rig.

Yeah. I really wish this board were AM3+ then I could just tell him to buy a Piledriver, but it's plain AM3 so used market is all we can work with w/o a new mobo.