Thinking of upgrading graphic - do I need to?

ionapaul

Hi all,

My gaming PC is about 3 years old at present; I can play all of my games quite well (medium-high settings on a 22" monitor), Fallout New Vegas, Batman: Arkham Asylum and Crysis were some of the recent games I've gone through. I'm currently starting on Mass Effect and I see some weird minor tearing in some cut scenes and am not sure is my GPU to blame or what; I also noticed the PC struggled with the Total War: Shogun 2 demo I played a few months ago, but I expected that.

Anyhow, my specs are:

Intel Core 2 Quadcore Q6700
4GB Ram
Nvidia GTX 260 (896MB)

What needs to be upgraded to be ready to play Batman: Arkham City with medium-high settings, or should I still be good?

If I wanted to spend say €120 or so, what should I get? If I get a new GPU, can I get another 18 months of life out of the machine (in terms of playing games anyhow).

Thanks

Serephucus

€120 won't buy you much of anything. You'd have to sell off old components.

Assuming you managed to get €60-70 for your 260, you could get a 6950, which would be quite and improvement.

http://www1.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsp?aid=44148&agid=1004

Monotype

Is the Q6700 overclocked? You could buy a cheapish heatsink (assuming you've got the Intel one) and get a bit more out of the CPU.

I don't know if it's still the case, but strategy games used to need good processing power.

uberpixie

ionapaul wrote: »

Anyhow, my specs are:

Intel Core 2 Quadcore Q6700
4GB Ram
Nvidia GTX 260 (896MB)

What needs to be upgraded to be ready to play Batman: Arkham City with medium-high settings, or should I still be good?

If I wanted to spend say €120 or so, what should I get? If I get a new GPU, can I get another 18 months of life out of the machine (in terms of playing games anyhow).

Thanks

You should be fine with what you are on the next while. I wouldn't upgrade the gfx card until you hit a game you can't play @ the settings you want.

If you upgrade the gfx card you will def get 12-18 months out of your pc easily. (a 6950 our similar in Nvidia would be as suggested by momotype, would be a good boost)

I'm currently on a Q6600 @ 3.0ghz with 4 gig ram and a radeon 6950 on a 22" monitor and the only game to give me any grief recently was the Witcher 2 (which I can still play @ high settings though not ultra!). Everything else will run @ fairly high settings even Metro ran @ respectable settings when I reinstalled it to benchmark the 6950.

A good upgrade in gfx card should tie you over nicely.

I personally won't be looking at a new CPU upgrade for another few months yet, Intel's new Ivy bridge chips will want to have been out for a few months before I jump over to one.

deconduo

Yeah if you can save up a bit more for a 6950, thats what you should be looking at. Make sure your PSU is good enough, though if it can run a GTX 260 it should be fine.

ionapaul

Just gotta bump this again: I don't overclock my Q6700 (so it runs at stock 2.66ghz) and my heatsink isn't anything special. Will a new HD 6950 be bottlenecked by the CPU?

Haven't overclocked a CPU in a long time, but I'm guessing I can overclock it a bit anyhow, even without improved cooling, right?

If bottlenecking is a big issue, I should probably go for a lesser card instead, maybe a HD 6850 or a GTX 560? Any advice gratefully accepted

ionapaul

This HD 6850 on Amazon seems like a good deal, with the free shipping and all. Thoughts?

ShadowHearth

Get 6870.

Great bang for your money. You wont need to upgrade your psu.

I don't think that putting anything higher then that is good.

I got q6600 with 3gb ram and now with 6870. It's defiantly bottlenecked by my processor, but still waaaaay better then 8800gt I had.

Witcher 2 on ultra with that ultra sampling ( or whatever it's called ) turned off. Wouldn't be far away of 60 fps. Metro 2033 On high settings dx11 very very smooth.