Upgrading my son's pooder

[plautus]

My son reports problems with the newest games: B'field 3, et al. Dropped frames, poor response time. He has an AMD system: AsRock N-68 mainboard, 4GB RAM, AMD Phenom II X2 3.0 Ghz CPU. He has a pretty good graphics card: nVidia GTX 560.

Short of buying a new barebones system, is there any way what he has can be upgraded? The games specs list a "quad core" CPU as being ideal. Can one be purchased for his current setup? Will it be problematic to install?

Thanks in advance for your advice.

John

 

[fralexandr]

what display are you using?
are there a lot of background processes running?
what game settings?
what do you mean by poor response time?
the game should run fine with that computer, though a quadcore would certainly help. the game shouldn't be dropping below 40fps

some of amd's CPUs can have their cores unlocked through a bios setting (your mobo says it has the "Unlock CPU Core" feature [rofl at the bad grammar ])

the mobo should support 95w TDP phenom II x4/x6 CPUs as per asrocks site
there are many variations of the N-68, but they seem to all support the same CPUs
http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=N68-S3 FX&cat=Specifications
it's not hard to upgrade CPUs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLVHFaokdgA

phenom II x4 at newegg TDP <= 95W

phenom II x6 at newegg TDP <= 95W

 

[denis280]

what display are you using?
are there a lot of background processes running?
what game settings?
what do you mean by poor response time?
the game should run fine with that computer, though a quadcore would certainly help. the game shouldn't be dropping below 40fps

some of amd's CPUs can have their cores unlocked through a bios setting (your mobo says it has the "Unlock CPU Core" feature [rofl at the bad grammar ])

the mobo should support 95w TDP phenom II x4/x6 CPUs as per asrocks site
there are many variations of the N-68, but they seem to all support the same CPUs
http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=N68-S3 FX&cat=Specifications
it's not hard to upgrade CPUs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLVHFaokdgA

phenom II x4 at newegg TDP <= 95W

phenom II x6 at newegg TDP <= 95W

yes with a quad will be a good upgrade.and if you are enable to unlock the 2 extra cores. you should get a better heatsink.the stock one will not keep it cool.