Yet Another upgrade post...

[Kartajan]

1. What YOUR PC will be used for. Moderate Gaming (CivV, UT3, mostly A/V consumption to include BluRay/DVD rip& encode)
2. What YOUR budget is. sub $590
3. Country: USA
4. Brand preference. none; Lean ASUS/Intel, but not adamantly
5. reuse: 8G DDR3 (GSkill F3-12800CL9), Crucial M4 CT128M4SSD2, Antec EA-650 650W, Case: Asus V3-P5G33 (Basic mATX case with semi decent airflow), Avermedia M780 PCIe Tuner
7. default speeds.
8. What resolution will you be using? 1920x1080
9. WHEN do you plan to build it? next week
X. Do you need to purchase any software to go with the system, such as Windows or Blu Ray playback software? NO

Considering ASUS P8H77-M PRO + i5-3550. Definitely a HD-7850.

My main issue is what degree of improvement I can expect from the IVB portion (is it worth the additional expense). I WILL upgrade the video card, but am on the fence as to if the gains from VirtuMVP (power savings), and speed (IVB from Lynnfield i5-750, SATA 6G from SATA 3G) would be worthwhile.. (approx. 250 GPU, +340 for MB and CPU)

Comments?

 

[Puppies04]

My main issue is what degree of improvement I can expect from the IVB portion (is it worth the additional expense).

You probably won't notice much of a difference in gaming unless the games are CPU limited, an I5 750 isn't really going to bottleneck a 7850. Blueray ripping/encoding will get a nice bump in performance though.

 

[mfenn]

You probably won't notice much of a difference in gaming unless the games are CPU limited, an I5 750 isn't really going to bottleneck a 7850. Blueray ripping/encoding will get a nice bump in performance though.

Overall, I agree with this assessment.

Civ V is somewhat CPU-limited, but you're unlikely to really be bothered by the difference between 45 and 60 FPS.