E8400 upgrade question....

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mobboss

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Apr 3, 2008
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Folks,

Well, its time for me to upgrade my 3 year old system. I currently have a system with an E8400 paired with a Nvidea Geforce 8800 GTS 512 card and am looking to upgrade to either a Radeon HD 6870 or a Geforce 560 Ti card. My question is basically is it worth it to upgrade this system with a new OS (Win 7), some additional memory (4 more gig for a total of 6) and a new video card (Radeon HD 6870 or Geforce 560 Ti).

My current system set up:

Gigabyte GA-P35-S3G LGA 775 mobo
Intel Core Duo E8400 CPU
2 gig ram (2x1 DDR2 800) memory
500 gig Western Digital HD
Geforce 8800 GTS 512 video card
Win XP
Generic DVD drive

Planning on making the following upgrades:

Win 7 Premium Home Edition
additional 4 gig ram (2x2 DDR2 800) for a total of 6 gig
Either a Radeon HD 6870 or Geforce 560 Ti video card.

My main concern is my mobo has a PCI Express x 16 slot and not a PCI E Express 2.0/2.1 x 16 slot. What kind of performance hit will I experience (if any) in putting a PCI E 2.0/2.1 card into a backwards compatible slot? Any concerns that it might not work at all?

Secondly, how badly (if at all) will I bottleneck myself with those modern video cards and my Intel Core Duo E8400 CPU? For what its worth, I typical game at lower resolution levels anyway, and prefer a decent combination of graphic detail vs playability...usually at 1280x1024 and sometimes at 1680x1050.

Basic reasons for upgrade is the entry of games like Battlefield 3 and others that flat out require Win 7 and a better video card to run decently.

Thanks in advance for your comments!!!
 
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M

mobboss

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So, from your experience, when you say 'ran fine' does that mean they were able to run recent games at playable speeds? To me, it would be worth the money as long as I got playable framerates from the GPU/CPU for recent games like BF3 at a moderate resolution.
 
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seriux

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I have an e8400 with a gigabyte HD6850 and i play BF3 and Skyrim on high settings @ 1080p.
I've only overclocked my e8400 to 3.6 and everything is like butter.

Hope this helps.
 
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ern88

ern88

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I just went from a E8400 @ 3.6 ghz to the i5 2500K @ 4.2 Ghz. I have a HD 5850 and I found a nice performance in BF3. I sugguest that you at least upgrade your video card. I went from a 9800 GTX to my HD 5850 almost 2 years ago. And that was a Huge improvement. So, if you don't upgrade your CPU. I highly recommend getting a new video card. You won't be dissapointed :)
 
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spentshells

spentshells

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A coworker upgraded to a 6950 from a 9800GTX with a stock e8400.
he refuses to overclock and is very happy with the performance in
games such as Crysis 2 and Metro 2033. I would personaly try to
push the CPU to at least 3.6. As far as gaming goes there are a lot of people
playing games with lesser CPU's than that.
 
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mobboss

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Sounds good guys. Looks like I will be either going for that HD 6870 or maybe a Geforce 560 instead of a 560 Ti.

Did see the price of that Powercolor HD 6870. That's going to be hard to beat. Plan on probably waiting till cyber Monday and see what Newegg has for prices.

Again, thanks!
 
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