Help for Upgrade or New build

[MiguelOne]

Hi Guys,

I'm one of the unfortunate souls last year who bought an 3800+ X2 for $350
just to have it blown away by Intel a just a month later.

This is my current setup
Cpu: amd 3800+X2
MotherBoard: A8n Sli-32 Premium
Memory: 1gig (2x512) OCZ DDR
Video: BFG 6600GT 128

I'm not going to list the rest as they are pretty basic.
Recently I bought a GTS superclock 648mb and i installed it. It runs great but i still can't pull off the highest res/highest settings on my games such as Supreme commander or Company of heroes. It chugs every now and then.

As stated in the article of tomshardware and some folks in the forums it's obvious im suffering with the 'bottleneck' syndrome where the CPU is just dragging the GPU down.

My question is...is it better for me to upgrade to the core2 duo family and change my mobo and ram or upgrade to a faster 939 CPU?

This is to keep in mind that i am almost broke from the 8800 and i would be selling off the parts i would be replacing with this upgrade/build.

My goal is to tap the full potential of my new baby (G80)
Let me know and thnx,

 

[akhilles]

1st thing you can do for free is to do a clean install of xp & run the games that were lagging.

If that doesn't help, overclock your pc.

The last option would be to upgrade the cpu/mobo & ram. Since the c2d prices dropped, there'd be no reason not to go c2d. I'd suggest an e4300, 650i ultra mobo & brand name value ram. That'd be the minimal & should get you up to speed.

Too bad newegg just pulled the 1st bfg 650i ultra sli mobo that cost about the same as mine, but with a much better heatpipe for north- & south-bridge coolers. It looked identical to 680i. It had all the characteristics to be a budget monster overclocker. I found it at anandtech.