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1155 cheap upgrade to stop a 6850 bottleneck

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well I currently have an E4700 core2duo @ 2.6ghz on LGA 775 with 3.5gb of usable ddr2 ram, it barely meets minimum requirements on todays games such as Far Cry 3 and Hitman absoluton

my 6850 on the other hand is a good card imo
I will soon be upgrading to a 7950 possibly and even now with my 6850 I feel like I'm hugely bottlenecked by my CPU

So for a while I've been saving and considering a 651k on the FM1 platform but recently decided against it as for a bit more I could have a platform like LGA 1155 which will still be getting new cpu's in the future and you know just generally the best gaming/overall platform



So yeah, I found a nice Asrock board, it's £70 full ATX, matt black, gold finish, no annoying mini fans, quad channel memory, usb 3, 4 case fan headers etc. just seems like a really good board, it's z68 so from what i've read it's just a much cheaper z77 with no ssd caching lol



ANYway, my main question is

what's a good CPU 'FOR NOW' that will do me well in modern-ish games and wont break the bank, i'm not talking 2500k terriroty, I'm talking i3s

I was looking at the new 3220, unfortunately no overclocking and dual core, but most games only need dual apart from bf3 but I played about 1000 hours of it on xbox, I don't care for it on PC anymore.

so yeah, is this a good option or what do you recommend? I will eventually sell it and get a 2500k of course but in the mean time... yeah

also, is ram really that important? I was hoping a single stick of 4GB corsair XM would do it, or is dual channel really that important, meh

More about : 1155 cheap upgrade stop 6850 bottleneck

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CPUs Master

If you have craigslist locally, see if you can find a used 2500k. Might as well get what you want now. I've never had any problems buying used cpus off craigslist. Just be sure your motherboard will support it. I found my used 2120 and asus h61 board for $125 recently. They were almost new. Owner upgraded both the board and cpu. Two days ago, a seller was unloading a used gigabyte z68 board and 2500k for $200 including the heatsink.
CPUs Master

I would recommend an H77 chipset board along with an Intel Core i3 3220. This will cost around ~$200 and bring you optimal performance :) 

i3 3220 will not bottleneck a GTX670; knowing this information, it will in no way bottleneck a Radeon HD7950.

If you do, however, want the most optimal performance, I would invest in something like an Intel Core i5 3450; it's a bit cheaper than a 3570k while bringing you quad-core Ivy Bridge goodiness :) 
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the 6850 is fine, people think a 670 is needed to achieve playable frames and no drops these days.

as for the i5, it's about £45 more than the 3220 so i'm gonna just get the 3220 I think

I live in the UK so craiglist doesn't exist, we have "gumtree" which is similar but not as popular yet(it's getting bigger) so i'd be lucky to find one i5 on there a month if that.

IF I can though, i'll get a used i5, I need the heatsink though, I can't afford an extra £30 cooler

Brett928S2 said:
Hi :) 

You also need something better than your 2 year old 6850.... its barely mid range these days...

All the best Brett :) 


Unless you are playing games at max settings possible, I would say a 6850 is mostly sufficient for a medium-high settings. You can easily achieve 40+ average fps in majority of games using 6850 with a little lowered details. For example in Metro2033 I get a minimum of 36 fps using a 7970@1080p and everything cranked up to max. I could also get a minimum of 40 fps using a 4890@1080p with medium details and dx 9. Definitely there is some improvement in visuals but they are hard to spot. Also most of the games are held by the conosle hardware and there are only a few PC games that are really demanding on pc hardware.
If you are interested only in gaming then I think pentium G850 or G650 would be sufficient for 6850.
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