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Would this be a smart upgrade for my setup?

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My PC is starting to get a bit dated (~3years old) and it's starting to show in the performance of the latest games and such.
Sadly I can't afford to build a new PC at this time, but were instead thinking of cheaper ways to upgrade my performance to give the setup a lifeline to last just a bit longer.

My current setup is the following;

Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0GHz 1333MHz 6M S775
GeForce 8800GTS 512mb
ABIT IP35 Pro
8gb (4x2gb) OCZ DDR2 PC2-6400 / 800 MHz / Reaper
Windows 7 (64bit)


Personally I feel that my CPU would be the bottleneck here and that's what I've been thinking of upgraging.
I were wondering if switching to a Core 2 Quad Q8400 2.66GHz 1333MHz 4MB S775 would be a worthwhile upgrade for me?

The Q8400 seems to be going for 185€ (£154) while my current E8400 also still seems to be valued at 170€ (£141).
That's about the most I could afford to be honest, upgrading both motherboard AND CPU is out of the question, simply can't afford it currently.

I use my PC for playing games such as World of Warcraft, CoD:Black Ops and Civilization 5 (which is especially hungry for CPU on huge maps) to name a few. Also watching HD movies and such.

So in short;

If my budget is ~200€ (£166) tops, would it be a good investment to switch the cpu, chainge something else that fits the budget or simply forget about it and try to work with the current setup? Wouldn't want to be throwing what little money I have down the sink if the upgrade in performance would be barely noticable.

Thanks in advance, would appriciate any and all helpful input I can get! :) 

More about : smart upgrade setup

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Homebuilt system Expert

I unless you had a buyer lined up for your C2Duo, and even then, I'd never upgrade to a quad that had slower 350+ MHz slower clock speeds, would likely end up near same performance in benchmarks. The higher your res, the more the gpu is usually the biggest bottleneck anyway.....

That's a bit what I was afraid of. Didn't like the idea of lower clock speeds either, but figured that maybe the additional cores would somehow magically improve the performance by reasonable amounts.

I looked at some AMD X4's and the cheapest I came across was Athlon II X4 640, AM3, 3.0GHz, 2MB, 95W for 103€ (£87), Phenoms were more expensive and the 2mb L2 memory on this one seems very low. Also when I started checking out the motherboards for the AM3 socket I noticed that even if I'd pick the cheapest most stripped down one, the majority of those utilize DDR3 memory units (my current units are DDR2) and the odd few that still had DDR2 slots only had two of them (I have 4 RAM units).

So I suppose this is just my time to start getting used to playing on slightly lower graphics settings and just get used to stuff working in a tad slower fashion...(?)

Don't suppose it would be any better to switch the graphics card for a new one in the 150€-200€ (£126-£186) price range only to still have the system limited by the same CPU?
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