Upgrade from Intel E6750

[ElMonoDelMar]

I have currently have a Core 2 Duo E6750 running on an ASUS P5E Deluxe board. I also have 6GB RAM and a Radeon HD 5770 gfx card. I'm looking to spend under $200 on a new processor to have a better experience running BF3 and am looking for suggestions.

I assume that I would get more bang for my buck going to a higher clocked dual core over a mid range quad. I don't know how BF3 performs on duals over quads so that's something to consider as well.

Suggestions?

 

[Dman8777]

Apparantly, BF3 likes quad cores. I'm not sure what the best quad core for your mobo is but you might want to look that up.

 

[alyarb]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/battlefield-3-graphics-performance,3063-13.html

Battlefield 3 does not demand a quad core CPU at all. Just like any other game, it may often like the availability of more than two cores during a handful of brief, intense moments or for load balancing but the unwritten rule that BF3 needs a quad is getting quite out of hand as it is completely false. You can see from the time-dependent graph that the intel CPU with two, three, and four cores enabled hardly deviates substantially. You will get far, far more performance out of your $200 by upgrading to a Radeon 6870 or similar.


As far as your Core2 duo, I will admit it's somewhat weak compared to a 3.4 GHz sandy bridge, but believe it or not your CPU can still hold its own in most games, particularly against AMD (which your small budget is leaning toward). You would be much better off getting a heatsink and implementing a mild overclock on your very flexible CPU/board that you have. 3.2-3.5 GHz on that chip is perfectly reasonable and will bring you better performance than a $200 AMD platform, for only the cost of a heatsink. I would not recommend spending money on a higher clocked dual or quad core CPU for your platform. At least spend some time overclocking your E6750 to test the limits of the CPU to determine whether spending ~$100 on a used E8400 and shooting for 3.8 GHz is worthwhile. It really is a terrible risk/reward proposition which is why I think you are better off staying where you are. Likewise spending $200 on an AMD platform would hardly be even a sidegrade in terms of single-threaded performance and you'll still be stuck with a weak GPU.

Your 5770 is less suitable for BF3 than your CPU, as you can see from these graphs more shaders and a wide GDDR5 bus is what BF3 "likes," not quads.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/battlefield-3-graphics-performance,3063-8.html

If you can sell your 5770 for $100 and get a radeon 6950, do that. Try and hold off on upgrading the CPU until mid-2012.

 

[tweakboy]

Intel 2500k Sandy Bridge for about 200 dollars.

But then you need a new motherboard and probably new RAM and new PSU and drop in a 5xx series nvidia card your spending over 500 there.... what you wanna do ? gl

gl

 

[ElMonoDelMar]

If you can sell your 5770 for $100 and get a radeon 6950, do that. Try and hold off on upgrading the CPU until mid-2012.

Probably the wrong forum, but would I find any benefit from picking up another 5770 for cheap and going with a crossfire setup?

 

[alyarb]

Crossfire will work, but it probably won't be as good as a single 6950.

 

[lehtv]

Yes, that'd give you performance roughly equal to a 6870. I doubt you could get $100 for the 5770 though, that's $10-20 less than a new 5770/6770. $70-80 is more realistic. But a 6950 will be faster and have more VRAM - and no crossfire issues. In the end though, 5770 crossfire would get you nearly the same average performance for about $150 less, certainly worth considering. I think on the whole it'd be the best upgrade you could do, provided your PSU is sufficient. Save the rest towards an upgrade to i5 sandy bridge or ivy bridge later.

Battlefield 3 does not demand a quad core CPU at all. Just like any other game, it may often like the availability of more than two cores during a handful of brief, intense moments or for load balancing but the unwritten rule that BF3 needs a quad is getting quite out of hand as it is completely false.

Those benches are based on the GPU-intensive single-player campaign. When you move to a 64-player conquest server, a powerful CPU will be very useful. On top of that, when playing online you'd want to lower your graphics settings a bit anyway to achieve smooth framerates - irrespective of whether you're on a 5770 or 6950. This makes the game overall more CPU dependent.

 

[skipsneeky2]

My oced e8200 at 3.2ghzs runs the single player just fine.

Online if i'm having a tank war with someone or trying to gun in a copter...its close to impossible to enjoy it.

Low amount of players on a server it is sorta playable but on a 64 player server forget it unless someone with a x2 565 or a 4ghzs e8400 could chime in?

 

[ElMonoDelMar]

My oced e8200 at 3.2ghzs runs the single player just fine.

Online if i'm having a tank war with someone or trying to gun in a copter...its close to impossible to enjoy it.

Low amount of players on a server it is sorta playable but on a 64 player server forget it unless someone with a x2 565 or a 4ghzs e8400 could chime in?

What kind of graphics card do you have? I can chopper gun on full 64 person servers without much problem. I do have all of the graphics set to low, though.

 

[skipsneeky2]

What kind of graphics card do you have? I can chopper gun on full 64 person servers without much problem. I do have all of the graphics set to low, though.

gtx560 non ti gpu usage isn't always pinged at 99% .

Was able to prime95 a 3.6ghzs oc today so perhaps it would help some cause going from 2.67ghzs to 3.2ghzs made a huge difference for me 😀

Not even gonna try a higher oc on this cpu 1.37v core and 1.33nb with gskill ddr2 800 at 2v 950....think i'm set there .