What to upgrade cpu or video card?

[zod96]

A friend of mine has two 8800GT's running in SLI. He also has a AMD X2 5600 and 4 GB's of ram and a Asus nvidia ultra chipset motherboard. He's been playing Stalker Clear sky and his system is starting to choke on certain parts of it. He's had to turn down the graphics to get a playable frame rate. Would it be better to just upgrade his video card to say something like a GTX275 or Ati 4870 or 4890, or would it be better to upgrade his cpu and ram? He's gaming at 16980x1050 on a 22 inch lcd....And he prefers AMD over intel he thinks Intel is the evil empire 🙂 and likes to help out the little guy....

 

[masteryoda34]

8800 GT SLI will be about as fast as a GTX 275 or 4890 if they scale good. I dont think that upgrading the video cards would be a big improvement unless he went to GTX 285, GTX 295, or ATI 4870 X2.

 

[MustISO]

If he can use an AM2+ processor that may be worth looking at.

 

[Scionix]

If it was me I'd upgrade the CPU just so later on I could upgrade the GPU with a big step up and not worry about bottlenecking. Either upgrade would do well, though.

 

[zod96]

That's what I was thinking I'll pass this info along to him thanks.....

 

[yh125d]

Yeah, 8800GT SLI is ~GTX275-280 level, so you'd have to spend 300+ to get a very big net gain GPU wise. PHII X3 720 would be a good upgrade

 

[jaggerwild]

Or over clock the CPU he has now.......................... so the gpu's could bloom better.

 

[yh125d]

Originally posted by: jaggerwild
Or over clock the CPU he has now.......................... so the gpu's could bloom better.

Even so, the old Athlon X2's are getting pretty dang slow, and a more up to date processor would be a very nice upgrade. Plus a PHII would spank an old X2 in terms of overclockability

 

[Denithor]

What mods does he have installed for Stalker? IIRC there's a texture pack that makes the game absolutely beautiful - but seriously stresses GPU and requires lots of video memory (512MB on 8800GT just doesn't cut it). There's a similar texture pack for Oblivion that brings even a GTX 280 to its knees because the card simply cannot buffer all the frames that have to be rendered and is forced to work from system memory (much much slower).

 

[Gikaseixas]

Keep the cards

with a BIOS update that board can be matched with a AM2+ cpu, like some guys said just get a X3 720BE.

Overclocking the 720BE with that board will give you some headaches, the Nvidia NB is outdated and was not designed for those cpus even thou they work. Performance will not be the best so you could consider getting a mobo/cpu combo if money is not an issue

 

[Tempered81]

upgrade the cpu

can he put a phenom II x4 in there and OC?

 

[happy medium]

Originally posted by: zod96
A friend of mine has two 8800GT's running in SLI. He also has a AMD X2 5600 and 4 GB's of ram and a Asus nvidia ultra chipset motherboard. He's been playing Stalker Clear sky and his system is starting to choke on certain parts of it. <He's had to turn down the graphics to get a playable frame rate. Would it be better to just upgrade his video card to say something like a GTX275 or Ati 4870 or 4890, or would it be better to upgrade his cpu and ram? He's gaming at 16980x1050 on a 22 inch lcd....And he prefers AMD over intel he thinks Intel is the evil empire 🙂 and likes to help out the little guy....

Why would he need a better cpu if this is true? Stalker clear Sky =highend video card. Does Stalker Clear Sky scale well with Sli?

Edit: A quick google tells me some people are having trouble with sli and there is a patch for Stalker Clear Sky. An Amd 5600@2.9 should be good enough to keep his framrates decent for now IMO.