Toribash
Original Post
2.7ghz dual core - bottlenecks 6870?
I was wondering if I would get better performance in games (i play up to date games at 1920x1080 res and highest graphics) if I upgraded from my dual core to ANY quad core (was looking into a 3.4ghz amd phenom though) is it really needed and is the 160$ for the quad core worth ugprading? (will i notice that much of an increase in performance?)
It should only be slightly bottlenecking if anything. But if you got a an actually decent quad core that included L3 cache and ran at 3.4 ghz, of course you'd see improved performance, especially in newer games that take advantage of more cores.
Last edited by Giantz; Jun 13, 2011 at 05:07 PM.
hi
the most performance gain you will notice in non heavily cpu based games you will see a 5-10 fps improvement or somewhere in that range. in heavily cpu based games you may see anywhere from a 10 - 20 fps improvement.

it's not a bad idea to get a quad core though. you can get a phenom II 965 for $130 and if you've already got an am2+/am3 125w cpu supported motherboard that's not a bad upgrade.
You don't say?
You will see an improvement from a higher clock speed. However it will probably be minor.
But 2 cores to 4? Only the most modern games can take advantage of 4 cores, so keep that in mind. YMMV.

Use "perfmon" (run -> perfmon) to check how much you are actually using during game. It may be that your CPU is not the bottleneck.
It could well be your RAM (or lack of) causing paging on to a slow HDD causing problems, and thus an upgrade to a few more gb of RAM could give big lifts.