Upgrade to a Phenom II 1090t

over your current cpu you would i can't say it would be very noticable though the 1100t runs at 3.3ghz stock and very few prgrams use 6 cores properly

you would probably be better with th i5 2500k which is a quad at around the same price but you would have to get a new mobo. but they can apperently be oc'd pretty high on air cooling.

other than that i would suggest a 965/970 phenom II BE which can be easily oc'd to 4ghz.

my personal opinion on hex cores is they are not much use unless your going to be encoding/decoding and i can't see support appearing for them any time soon

Yeah, I was thinking about a 970 as well, for that 3.5ghz stock speed, I do alot of gaming and when I clock up my 940 to 3.4 I can notice a boost in performance.

If you overclock your 940BE you can probably match all those CPU's at stock or better. The X6 will not do anything for gaming but there are applications that would benefit. So what do you use the computer for?

970 at 3.5 versus 940 at 3.4 is almost a 3% performance increase. Hardly worth the effort.

i recently got the 970 and its pretty good i oc'd it to around 3.9 stable on stock volt with a gelid slinlentspirit fan which are fairly cheap but ive had heat problems with having to sit it in an old case so have yet to try and go any higher until i buy a new case with better airflow. but it seems it will go over 4ghz fairly easy on air cooling.

I use my computer for gaming, of course, I just switched to ATI and got a 6970 (xmas and bday present rolled into one) and I'm selling my old nvidia cards on ebay, so I was thinking of using that money to upgrade my cpu, but who knows, would a better motherboard (am3) and some ddr3 be better?

well if you want to get the most out of your cpu getting an am3 mobo should allow HTT to run at a faster speed dunno what performance boost this would give though

If you are swapping then AM3 board and DDR3 ram would maximize the return. (gain)

^+1

How's that 6970? Since you're probably gaming at high resolution and high settings there's no big difference between your CPU and a 970. DDR3 isn't faster than DDR2. Wait for the Bulldozer and Intel's new high end socket and then decide.

I can tell you the the x6 is blazing fast , I have the 1100 and it is amazing , it is oc to 4.0 on air with stock cooler , never gets over 52c . Programs install in a flash , games run great , convert and encode videos so fast it is crazy .
Plus in the off time it crunches for WCG at an insane rate .Love this CPU runs fast and cool , nothing comes close to taxing it . Memory runs at 1600 , have 2 x 4GB sticks gskill F-3 1280 , stable and fast .
7.9 WEI stock , 8.1 when OC to 4,0 Ghz

that 6970 kicks ass, thank you for asking, I love it, I've been an nvidia guy for as long as I can remember but it seems like they're whole physx thing is just to sell more hardware, the games that do have them run like crap unless you have a dedicated card for them. I was having micro stuttering in fallout new vegas and some other dx9 games with the 470 I had before, but the 6970 is silky smooth, its a big boost over that 470 and I love it, did I mention I love it? I mean, I've made sweet, sweet love to it!

now i may be being stupid here or have missed an update but isn't the highest WEI score you can get 7.9?

aye unless subscores are not limited, which would make the toatal score fairly useless. and my ram seems maxed at 7.9 even when i overclock.

i think we are going back to that old internet tradition of pic or it didn't happen  
but if it is a lie, please don't lie especially when recommending a product it's unfair on the person your recommending it to. they spend their hard earned money on things we recommend expecting that level of performance. and while im sure the 1100 is a great chip there are better ways to get you point across.

and anyway WEI is not exactly the best thing to go for scores on.

6.9   upgrading soon only just got the cpu, mobo and ram and its all being bottlenecked by the gpu  

whole score is let down by the hdd though with a lowly 5.9  
i need a new HDD anyway as i need to switch to 64bit and dont have an external so ill just get a new hdd and transfer my files across hopefully then i can use my old drive for storage.

i do... but not the money  
just started updating my computer. built my first gaming rig two years ago and its done me well until now but few recent games being slow on it got me to upgrade.
unfortunately here in the uk parts are far more expensive. in dollars usually around $100 - $150 more expensive than the US price.
got my things planned though looking at the 6870 for a gpu dunno about what hdd to get.

know anything about hard drives? because i damn well don't  

oh im not touching ssd until you can get a decent size for a good price  
i will take a look at the ones you have recommended though thanks  

wow those F4 spinpoints are fairly cheap £60 for 2TB cost me £50 for my 500GB drive when i got it