What do I need to upgrade?

[nick12345]

Hi,

I recently purchased a 6970 2GB but I am getting little bits of lag some places. Its usually about 40 fps but sometimes dips to like 25... only for a few secs but it is annoying...

my specs are

6970 2GB
AMD Phenom II X4 (old C2 Chip)Quad Core 955 Black Edition "125W Edition" overclocked to about 3.75GHz stable-ish temps range from 41c idle to 60c in full load.
Zalman CNPS9700-LED CPU Cooler
Asus M4A78T-E AMD 790GX
Crucial Ballistix 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10600C7 1333MHz

What should I upgrade?

Also, sorry if this is stupid but can i fit a core i5 on my mobo?

thanks

 

[Gothams Finest]

Hello. No, you will need to buy an Intel motherboard to fit an i5 CPU.

A few quick questions. What games do you play? what resolution do you use? what power supply do you have? and what is your budget?

 

[gmcizzle]

There's really nothing to upgrade on that platform, a bulldozer chip won't do any better than a 955. No, AMD and Intel based motherboards/CPUs are not compatible with each other, so the only way to upgrade would be to buy a new motherboard and CPU. A 2500k won't be that big of an upgrade though. Are you getting fps dips on BF3 on maxed out ultra settings, or fps dips on a game like starcraft 2? Also, what's your resolution?

 

[nick12345]

My res is 1080p and i am playing sky rim on max detail... except shadows with are high and AF is x8 and AA is x4

The FPS jumps around massively... when looking at a mountain it is at like 60FPS but when walking in a city it can drop to 25fps...

Should I remove a stick of ram so it will be dual channel? but only 4 gigs... could this be the problem?

 

[Gothams Finest]

Skyrim is not very well optimised at the moment at all. A lot of people are expericing the same problems as you are, evan with better hardware.

Skyrim offloads shadow rendering to the CPU which is why the CPU gets hammerd so much, Bethesda need to make it more optimised. Patch 1.2 is coming out next week so hopefully that will improve performance.

Is it just Skyrim that you have these problems on?

 

[nick12345]

ah right

and yeah portal 2 and GTA are fine at max settings...