Upgrade or build a new one?

[Underlight]

Hey guys I have a Dell Intel Quad Core PC and it ran an ATI Radeon 3xxx series. I upgraded it to a 9800 GT two years back. I want to upgrade it again. So I bought a GTX 460 Fermi from Best Buy to try it out and I was able to run Crysis at 30+ fps at
1920 x 1080 resolution with 16x AA and Extreme settings. So I returned it and now I'm quite happy that it is able to take a better graphics card as I upgraded the PSU to 550W BFG SLi Cert PSU a couple years back.

My question here is should I buy a new PC or simply upgrade the graphics card better than the GTX 460. I was also able to OC it to 825Mhz which is a relief as well.

My Dell Studio XPS Build:

- Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q8200 @ 2.33GHz
- RAM: 8GB
- 64 Bit OS
- 9800 GT (I think 1 GB) (I bought the GTX 460 to see if it would work with it, I returned it and want a better one if I upgrade)

I want to be able to run Crysis 2 and BF3 and Metro 2033 on high settings. How much will my CPU bottleneck me when BF3 comes out? If it's a huge bottleneck should I make a new computer? If I do upgrade which graphics card should I get I have a decent budget for the video card.

Please advise!

Thanks!

 

[ukee1593]

I think you are really going to have issues with bottlenecks if you continue to upgrade that system! The GTX 460 is probably about the fastest GPU that you could run on that system without it severely bottle necking the CPU. If you could overclock that CPU from 2.3GHz to 3.0GHz then you might be alright with a new GPU in the system ... but I doubt that the DELL motherboard will allow you to overclock it.

IF you HAVE to go with a new GPU in that system I would suggest getting an AMD radeon 6970. The AMD GPUs tend to be a little nicer to the CPU and shouldn't bottleneck it as much as a NVidia GPU. It isn't going to be perfect though ...

For a new system I'd suggest a Sandy Bridge Core i5 with a z68 chipset motherboard. Although considering how powerful your system still is I'd just wait for intel 22nm Ivy Bridge early next year and the AMD Radeon 7000 series too. In the mean time see how much you can get the old 9800 GT to overclock to.

 

[computernugget]

well, you can try upgrading your cpu to not bottleneck the higher cards after the gtx460. if you just upgrade the video card, then the 6870 or the gtx 560 ti will be a good choice for when bf3 comes out. but of course a faster quad core will also benefit you too cuz im pretty sure that frostbite 2 will benefit from having a quad core