WTB Core 2 Quad

[dooms87]

Hi all i'm here on behalf of a friend of mine who's looking to buy a temporary upgrade until Ivy bridge comes out whenever it does. He has some dual core wolfdale cpu atm not sure which but he's looking to grab some sort of core 2 quad so he can play games without totally bottlenecking his 560 ti. I'm not entirely too familiar with this family of processors but any info/offers would be appreciated trying to spend between 75-120ish dollars

 

[dalauder]

Look up what CPU he has and you'll need the motherboard model. You'll want to make sure the mobo is compatible with C2 Quads. And there are two lines of C2 Quads so some motherboards say they're compatible but really just mean the Q6600/6700.

If he's got an E8500 or something like that, he'll be fine in a lot of scenarios. Benchmark with his CPU at stock and benchmark with it underclocked a bit to make sure it's bottlenecking.

Look up your CPU info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_2_microprocessors

Get some idea of its performance here:
http://cpubenchmark.net/
You'll want a CPU that

Also, look into overclocking the CPU to get a lot more out of it. My friend's E2200 (2.2GHz stock) did 3.0GHz without much fuss. That would be a whole new thread.

I'm just trying to save you the trouble of an upgrade if you don't need it.

 

[dooms87]

he has a E8400 with some overclock on it but he gets absolute trash fps on the games he plays like hes getting barely 30 fps in BC2 with that processor and a gtx 560 ti on low settings

 

[dalauder]

You'll see that an E8400 performs similarly to many Core 2 Quads in gaming here: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-gaming-cpu-core-i5-2500k-amd-e350,2843-6.html

My guess is that you'll want a minimum of a Q9400 to see any significant improvement and you'll want to overclock it.

But based off of this benchmark, you're probably not limited by the CPU:
http://www.legionhardware.com/articles_pages/battlefield_bad_company_2_tuning_guide,7.html

Something else is the bottleneck. Some motherboards set the PCI-e to 1x by default. Maybe it needs to be set to 16x manually. Try your CPU at different speeds and see how it benches. Try several benchmarks and see if it's just BC2 or other programs like Furmark as well.

What RAM does he have (configuration and speed?)?

FYI: He could probably hit fsb 400MHz with that CPU to get it to 3.6GHz. Make sure to reduce RAM speed and to monitor temps though.