Upgrade Path

You now have a very good and balanced system. You may have to do a complete rebuild to improve significantly.


If you are gaming at 1920 x 1080 or larger, then a graphics upgrade might be in order. But... you might not notice the benefits of a two tier jump to a 5850.

If your games are capable of using more than 2 cores, then upgrading to a quad might be good, but there are only a handful of games that could benefit.

To assess the possibilities, try a couple of tests:

1) Run your games, but reduce the resolution and eye candy to a minimum. This will simulate what will happen if you upgrade to a stronger graphics card. If your FPS improves, it indicates that your cpu is capable of driving a stronger graphics card to higher levels of FPS.

2) Keeping your graphics resolution and settings the same, reduce your cpu power. Do this by removing the overclock, or by using windows power management to set a maximum cpu% of perhaps 70%. If your FPS drops significantly, it indicates that your current cpu is a limiting factor, and that a faster cpu would help. 3.6 is already a good overclock. A i5 or i7 cpu will be perhaps 15% faster, clock for clock. You would have to do some work to get one safely to 4.0.

If you stay with the core 2 line, and go to a quad, the clock rate will be lower, so if you go that route, make certain that you need more cores, versus a higher clock rate or you will be disappointed. I would not go that route and invest in an older generation quad and mobo today.