Old System, New Card Worth It?

Tittle kinda says it all but my system is kinda of old and I would like to still get more mileage out of it. If I were to switch up to a 7870(or 78750), or a gtx 670 would I even get any improvement? I'm thinking not because my bottlenecks are probably my Core 2 Quad, and DDR2 ram, but does anyone know otherwise?

Hmm, well I have a q6600 with a 7950. I don't feel I am bottle necking it much at all. I don't play bf3 or other massive multiplier games much. But even if I did there are specific settings that you can turn down that are more CPU dependent and therefore still get the most out of your newly acquired card.

I feel the 560ti is a great card and an almost perfect match for a stock q6600 (2.4ghz). What games are you having trouble with that makes you want to upgrade? I almost went with a 560ti because they can be had for such a low price.

I looked at a lot of graphs over 9 months before upgrading my 285GTX to the 7950. And from what I can tell is there is little bottle necking when running close to 3.6-4.0 ghz on a quad.

Hope that helps.

I should have gotten a 7850 that overclocks well. I kind of regret that. Better bang for buck.

You can run GPU-Z in the background while you game and watch your GPU Load. If your framerate isn't capped and your GPU usage isn't close to 100% most of the time then in general you don't have much to gain.

My .02 is that any Core2Quad is dated at this point and many if not all games will be bottlenecked by it sooner than they will be by your 560Ti. Games like L4D2 will be bottlenecked by your CPU to about 200FPS which probably won't bother you. But games like WoT, Planetside 2, BF3, CoH and many more will be CPU bottlenecked to less than 60FPS frequently and your 560Ti will probably be a good match if not overkill compared to your CPU in these titles.

So GPU-Z would be a good check just to be sure whatever you play will make good use of a better GPU.

I had a Q9550 clocked to 3.8GHz with my GTX 570 and it did not bottleneck in BF3 or crysis or metro 2033. When I upgraded to 2500k at 5.0 GHz with my GTX 570 I did not gain any FPS in any games.

I think you would be fine with GTX 570 or HD 7870.

wingman99 said:

I had a Q9550 clocked to 3.8GHz with my GTX 570 and it did not bottleneck in BF3 or crysis or metro 2033. When I upgraded to 2500k at 5.0 GHz with my GTX 570 I did not gain any FPS in any games.

I think you would be fine with GTX 570 or HD 7870.

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And because of testimonies like yours I have read over and over I upgraded to my current card with my q6600. Giving myself an extra year out of my computer.

pinky33 said:

And because of testimonies like yours that I have read over and over I upgraded to mine current card with my q6600. Giving myself an extra year out of my computer.

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Thanks that is what overclocking is about for me, I just like to save money my self and make big jumps when I upgrade, When Haswell comes out you can upgrade and still use your HD 7950

Okay so I tested BF3 on high settings with GPU-Z on my gtx 560ti and it currently runs at 92-100% load at 40-60 fps sometimes dipping to the 30s. I think this means I could do with a better card?

All your personal preference. There's tons of people here that hate dips below 30, I'm fine with anything above 20 personally.

I can attest to the fact one 670 is about like two 560tis..

the HD7950 is at an insane value right now with some models selling for $260...

If you can find one at or around a sub $300 price point i'd jump on it... as that is a lot of card

560ti and bf3 do not mix well because of the limited 1gb of vram. I would think a 7870 or 7950 would be just fine with a over clocked q6600 giving you another year or so before needing to upgrade. I would go for any card that has at least 2gb of beam so a minimum of a 7870 to notice any difference in fps.

My 1GB of vram is doing fine for me with BF3 I run everything on ultra max single monitor.

Odd. While playing multiplayer on ultra @1080p I use up to 1110mb then a stutter and it drops to 990mb slowly rising to 1110mb again. My friend has a 2gb 670 and on ultra settings @1080p it uses 1670mb of vram and always holds 60fps. I'm not sure but everyone I have talked to has the same issue on ultra @1080p with any 1gb GPU. Your SIG says you have a 570 which could be 1.5gb or the 2.5gb flavor which would help with any stuttering.

I have 1280MB vRam and it plays like this on all maps.
I don't think it's the Vram that is making yours stutter I think it's the memory bus yours could be 192 bit or 256 bit bus and mine is 320bit

I have not read any reviews that say lack of v ram causes stuttering, only lower FPS, it's like the cache on the CPU if it's not there in vram it will pull from main memory when needed and it's not a huge performance hit if you have what is recommended for the game specifications.

BF3
Recommended System Requirements

•OS: Windows 7 64-bit
•Processor: Quad-core CPU
•Memory: 4 GB
•Hard Drive: 20 GB
•Graphics Card: DirectX 11 graphics card with 1024 MB RAM (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560
or AMD ATI Radeon 6950)
•Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
•Keyboard and Mouse
•DVD ROM Drive
http://www.howstuffworks.com/ram3.htm
VRAM: VideoRAM, also known as multiport dynamic random access memory (MPDRAM), is a type of RAM used specifically for video adapters or 3-D accelerators. The "multiport" part comes from the fact that VRAM normally has two independent access ports instead of one, allowing the CPU and graphics processor to access the RAM simultaneously. VRAM is located on the graphics card and comes in a variety of formats, many of which are proprietary. The amount of VRAM is a determining factor in the resolution and color depth of the display. VRAM is also used to hold graphics-specific information such as 3-D geometry data and texture maps. True multiport VRAM tends to be expensive, so today, many graphics cards use SGRAM (synchronous graphics RAM) instead. Performance is nearly the same, but SGRAM is cheaper.

That is a old explanation however still works the same way with the CPU. From what I read if you don't have the recommended Vram the game will lockup or the game will not give you max settings to work with or will not play do to not enough Vram.

No it's the lack of vram that causes stuttering because it has to rebuffer the textures once it hits the from limit. Most if not all of the new gets 600 series are 256bit gddr5 so its not that at all. If in your video you turned on the memory usage I bet you will see bf3 uses 1260mb of your memory in large maps. Metro isn't that intensive unless playing 64 player servers.

peanutbudder said:

No it's the lack of vram that causes stuttering because it has to rebuffer the textures once it hits the from limit. Most if not all of the new gets 600 series are 256bit gddr5 so its not that at all. If in your video you turned on the memory usage I bet you will see bf3 uses 1260mb of your memory in large maps. Metro isn't that intensive unless playing 64 player servers.

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No it does not work that way the vram is always being buffered by the CPU and GPU no matter what amount of Vram you have it does it a little at a time like system ram. Stuttering on a single card means you don't have enough memory speed or bus with and the 600 series cards went with a 256bit bus with faster memory 6.008GHz than the 500 series cards memory 4.008GHz that's how they avoid stuttering.

In 64 player servers I do fine with 1280mb running ultra max no stuttering.

Makes sense I guess..

Just played some caspian border 48p on ultra @1080p getting a high of 135fps with a low of 46fps and would say the average is about 70-75ish. I didn't notice the stuttering like I had before but I honestly haven't played the game in a few months since hackers ruined a game and pissed me off. I have also installed new drivers since then so maybe something changed along the way I don't know... I guess I will put my foot in my mouth. The game still needs a ton of vram and my buddies 670 chugs along with 1600+mb being used.

Just for the fun of it on BF3 I set my res 2048x1536 and my vram was running at 1276MB and my FPS averaged 30 FPS no stuttering or lag with a full 64 player map also my my FPS did dropped below 30 some times, there were FPS dips and the screen locked up once with the vram at 1278MB, so I'm going to get back to gaming now.