Evga GTX 550ti problems

[Seanp94]

Hey there i recently got a rather old computer for free, its a HP pavilion a6430
its:
2.10 gigahertz AMD Phenom 8400 Triple-Core
128 kilobyte primary memory cache
512 kilobyte secondary memory cache

with 3g of memory and it had a built in graphic card that was just... really bad. so i bought a graphics card and a new PSU:

EL Series 600 Watt ATX Power Supply
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti 1024MB GDDR5 PCIe 2.0 x16


i have been playing WoW and Starcraft 2 now for quite some time and the FPS on starcraft is like 20-30 fps at the start, but then it freezes up.. and it stays there for about... say 1 min.. maybe less.. maybe more.. then it starts up hits 30 fps.. then freezes again with in 1 min, and its normally when i am building my base, not in battle and does this only in Vs AI, or Vs online player in story mode its pretty stable.

In WoW the cap of my FPS is 30 fps on ultra 40 in high and 40 in med.
yet when i get into raids it drops... HEAVILY... and im not too sure if its the graphics card at this point..

i am running windows 7 32 bit with 3g's of memory and i think it could be that but i want to make sure. or it could be the processor i am not to sure. so what i am asking is, do i need to upgrade my memory or my processor to get better game playing results? and What can i get to make it better and keep the price down? or Is this all i will get out of this machine and i am better of buying a new tower and just swapping PSU's and GPU's?

Also my mother board is:

Board: ASUSTek Computer INC. NARRA3 3.02
Bus Clock: 200 megahertz
Memory sockets: 4 x DDR2

 

[itzdanielp]

More than likely it is either a RAM or CPU bottleneck, as the GPU is fine for what you are doing.

 

[Seanp94]

Now when you say CPU bottleneck what do you mean by that? not trying to sound like a newb

 

[itzdanielp]

haha, no worries

It means that although the GPU can process the graphics fast enough, the CPU or RAM is not able to keep up with it. Unfortunately with computers, you are only as fast as the slowest component. So even though the GPU is perfect, you are limited to how fast your CPU and RAM is performing.

A cheap way to find out would be to get a bit more RAM, see if that helps.

 

[Seanp94]

Ah thank you for the explanation that helps a lot! i just have one more question for you. would it be cheaper/ better in the long run if i upgrade the mother board and CPU? also including the ram. because i think with the motherboard i have now and the CPU i have, i think it limits me with my Ram if i am not mistaken..

 

[itzdanielp]

Yeah, it would definitely be better to upgrade the 3 of those.

I would suggest a P67 or Z77 based motherboard with an i5-2500k.

Also an 8 or 16GB DDR3 at 1600MHz kit depending on budget.

MB brands I would go with Asus or Gigabyte, but ASRock is a solid option as well, and a bit more budget oriented.

 

[Seanp94]

Wow thank you very much this helped a lot!

 

[itzdanielp]

no problem!

good luck