Phenom II x2 555 or GTX460 1g help me decide

[Someguy5397]

I have a Athlon 64 x2 4600+ OC'd to 2.7ghz and an Asus EN9800gt OC'd to gpu@720mhz mem@1110mhz shader@1700mhz on a Gigabyte m57sli-s4 rev 2.0 with 4 gigs of ddr2 800 ram. i have an Okia 600W psu.

I'm looking at getting a AMD Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition for about 90 bucks on newegg, and later upgrade my mobo to maybe unlock the other 2 cores, plus get some ddr3 at some other point in time. I'm also looking at nvidia's gtx460, I've been reading alot about it overclocking very easily and being a good mid range card.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103846
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127510

I would like my min frame rate to stabilize and was wondering which would do it better. I am on a budget and was looking strongly at the CPU but then again I would need to spend more on the mobo and mem to use it to its peak. I will have to save up for the gtx460 1g ver. I'm in to future proofing my system so I dont have to buy upgrades every year, but im cheap/poor so I would like some help deciding which to go after first.

 

[Someguy5397]

oh yah, my monitor is native 1900x1080

 

[andrern2000]

Well, if you use Athlon 64 x2 4600+ OC'd to 2.7ghz then buy a GTX 460, games will bottleneck at CPU (slower processing at CPU). But knowing you running at native 1900x1200 you need GTX 460 1 GB.
Even if you buy Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition, the games will still bottleneck at CPU processing data. You want to know how fast GTX 460 is.

Your VGA card is good. But playing heavy 3D games in 1900x1280 sure is torture for it. If, you played heavy 3D games like Metro 2033, Farcry 3, Mass Effect 2, Halo 3, etc. in 1900x1280, I think it's better to buy GTX 460 because, you don't want the bottleneck to be in Graphics card. Bottleneck in Graphic card means lag in frames per second and unsmooth game, up to the point it becomes unplayable. It's better be CPU bottleneck than GPU, although there should be not too much CPU bottleneck or else the computer keeps loading data when playing.

But if you can lower monitor's resolution to 1680x1020, you can buy the processor first. 9800 GT OC'ed can stand for some while if you run at that screen res.

 

[Someguy5397]

I've noticed even if i lower my res to 1280x720 (not its native 1920x1080) it still gets the similar min frame rates when it loads the area and my FPS lowers a lot if I'm playing a mmo game with lots of players in a big city, or even in heavy fire fights in offline games. thats why I was thinking the CPU upgrade would be better to start but I'm unsure how much load a CPU takes as far as effecting the min frame rates.

reading through some forums I have come across some that say if the min frame rate is low then its the CPU. which making me think I might need to start with that, but I don't know much about CPU specs.

Here is how the Gpus stack up my 9800gt OC vs GTX460 OC i found at geeks3d using GPU-Z
tech 65mm vs 40mm
ROPs 16 vs 32
Shaders 112 vs 224
Pixel Fillrate 11.5GPixel/s vs 26.7 GPixel/s
Texture Fillrate 46.1GTexel/s vs 46.8 GTexel/s
Mem Type 512 DDR3@256bit vs 1g DDR5@256bit
Mem bandwidth 71.4 GB/s vs 133.8 GB/s

So yah, I know that getting the GTX460 will be better, but will it fix the low min frame rate issues i seem to have?

 

[Someguy5397]

oh you edited while I was looking up stat, lol

 

[megamanx00]

A tough one. For 1080p, upgrade your card. Even with a better CPU your 9800GT won't make it for more demanding games . It's true that you're way overdue for a CPU upgrade, but you've waited this long so you may as well wait a bit more for bulldozer. In the mean time, I would try and overclock that CPU a bit more and see if you can't get 3.0GHz.

 

[Someguy5397]

Nice a 'Bulldozer' you say. What kind of cost are we looking at do you think? Will I need a new motherboard to support it? 8 cores in 32nm tech sounds awesome but pricey. I've only done a quick scan of it. like i said before, I'm not too up on the CPU market.

 

[Someguy5397]

I would try and overclock that CPU a bit more and see if you can't get 3.0GHz.

The most I have gotten to is a bus speed of 232 @ x12 but any more and it wont post. So I kicked it back down to 226 so make sure it run smoother. I am new to cpu overclocking, the temp is up to about 60C right now, I think my heatsink might be limiting it. Plus I'm not too sure what is safe and what will burn up my hardware.

 

[iam2thecrowe]

your current cpu is already creating a bottleneck to your 9800gtx I would think. The 9800gtx is the same as a gts250, so its not that slow really. Your probably best off to upgrade the CPU first and go from there. Is it a 1gb vid card or a 512mb? If only 512 mb, that could be a limiting factor when playing in higher resolutions.

 

[Someguy5397]

So after some more testing I found that my monitor is part of the problem with low min FPS. I grabed my wife's 1440x900 native and ran Unigines Heaven benchmark in Dx10 then on mine lowered to 1440x900, the most parts scored the same

her's vs mine

FPS 47.2 vs 46.6
score 1189 vs 1174
min fps 25.7 vs 17.6
max fps vs 109.0 108.0

but the min frame rate was lower by 46% just by lowering my res, plus I notice a slight blur effect when its not in it's native 1920x1080. This makes me think I need the bigger video card :/ I was really hoping to just get away with buying a newer CPU and be good for awhile.

Does anyone know how much or what my current Athlon is limiting?