Phenom II 550BE, 720BE or 940BE?

Hi,

I am having issues with my current setup and America's Army 3. I don't know what my FPS are as I can't get my fps to show, but I know they cant be good. I have freak video lag when I'm in firefights. I also only get around 5-10 fps in GTA IV. I play both in lowest settings and in lower resolutions than 1680x1050 and still see lag. In AA3 I go to the lowest possible resolution 12XX x 7XX and windowed mode and I still lag when in big fire fights.

Here is my setup:

22.1 inch chimei monitor at 1680x1050 native
amd 3700+ 2.2ghz single core
2gb ram
asus a8n-sli prem
evga 8800gts 320mb
xfi-xtrememusic
600watt ocz modxstream psu
antec p180 case
windows XP sp3
1 hdd 160gb
12mb cable modem connection with a 8 year old linksys router that has half duplex WAN (cutting my bandwidth on connected computers to 5-6mbps (but AA3 still lags even when I'm connected directly to the cable modem with the 10-12mb connection.)) gonna replace my router soon for a full duplex WAN port one.

This system was built in 2006 and I am looking upgrade some of the parts.

My question is - if I upgrade the memory, mobo, and CPU to 4gb (2x4gb), windows 7, and a phenom II x2 550be (at the very least) will I see my FPS shoot up from 5-10 in GTA IV to 20-25 at 1680x1050?

Also, is my cpu bottlenecking my video card or do I need a new one of those too?

I'm kinda pissed at EVGA because my 7900gt failed after 2 years, but I'm pretty sure it was half broken when I bought it new because I never saw amazing fps in battlefield 2. Then they sent me a refurb 8800gts 320mb which generates lost of white noise when its put under a load.

The bottleneck is clearly the CPU in your setup, I am surprised you are even able to run GTA4 as some people with dual core's have trouble running it.

Unfortunately I can't comment on AA3 as I don't know it.

Your 8800GTS is a respectable card and you would see a great deal of FPS increase with a newer CPU, motherboard and ram combo however the 320MB of memory on the videocard is too little for GTA4.. I am pretty sure however that 20-25fps is possible but it will look pretty bad.

If GTA4 is what you want, you need a videocard with a bare minimum of 512MB ram...

This would work very well if you can invest on videocard too
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] -_-Product

But besides GTA4, the 8800GTS even with only 320MB is still a good card.

I would say AMD has a CPU for everyone... in other words it depends mostly on you and your budjet.

I would rule out the 550BE as I think dual cores will expire soon as software is starting to be more multithreaded. It is still a fine gaming cpu tho.

The 955BE if the budget is there.


my recommendation if GTA4 is something you want to run well would be.

AthlonII 630
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] -_-Product

With the videocard posted above.

Would make a bigger difference then a 955 with the 8800GTS

As I said, depends on your budjet