Upgrading advice

[Nesto1000]

A few months back around april, I decided to build my first desktop.
These are the specs:
AMD Athlon II X3 @ 2.9Ghz
BIOSTAR A785G3 MicroATX MB
G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3 1600
Western Digital Caviar Black WD7501AALS 750GB
CORSAIR CMPSU-450VX 450W

and recently I added an XFX Radeon HD 5770

I've been playing a few games, and they lag at times...
I'm thinking that my CPU might be bottlenecking my GFX card...

Is it worth upgrading my CPU to a Phenom II x4?
or should I just stick with the Athlon II X3?

 

[etk]

Games don't benefit from a 4th core, Stick with the X3. Overclock if you wish (it's free, why not?) But it could well be the 5770 is the limitation too. If overclocking doesn't fix the problem, then you know it's the GPU. It would be more helpful to know what games lag, as some are more CPU intensive.

 

[Nesto1000]

Games don't benefit from a 4th core, Stick with the X3. Overclock if you wish (it's free, why not?) But it could well be the 5770 is the limitation too. If overclocking doesn't fix the problem, then you know it's the GPU. It would be more helpful to know what games lag, as some are more CPU intensive.

I would consider overclocking, but I don't really want to mess with the voltage... I'm not an overclocker, but i believe that my processor will only overclock like that...

The one game that lags a bit is Fallout New Vegas, it's still pretty playable though. It only laggs a few times while I play, but it still bugs me though.
F1 2010 also laggs massively for me... I play it at 1280x720, at med settings, and when i try to race with mulitple cars on the road, I lagg pretty horrible. When I do time trials in the game though, I'm all good...

 

[Fire Lancer]

IIRC all X3's have a hidden 4th core. Many motherboards are able to unlock these hidden cores (I think mine just has like 1 BIOS setting I can set to "on). No guarantees, but if it works you just got a free core.

I have a 1GiB 5770 (with an X6 1055T CPU) and haven't noticed any problems as long as I don't try to play on like max settings (1600x900 display) although I overclocked mine to 950MHz core.

 

[Nesto1000]

even if you mobo has an unlocker option in BIOS, there's no guarantee that the cpu will be stable with 4 cores.
a large amount of the triple cores are triple cores for a reason and not quads..!

I've tried it before, and it's stable... the only problem is that I can't tell what the temperatures are with the 4th core enabled.
I'm not opting out for 8 gigs of dual channel memory cuz that's simply too expensive for me...
SSD, is also something too expensive that I don't need. I don't care much for the load times since either way its doesn't take long to load.


Fire Lancer:
The highest settings that I game on is, 1366x768. That's the highest screen res for my monitor...