Help upgrading

[Lengalicious]

Ok, my current specs are in the sig below. I'm starting to see pretty big dips in performance in modern games at the max settings such as witcher 2 and dragon age 2. In fact Dragon age 2 only runs at reasonable FPS on medium settings without AA. Maybe its badly coded? I dunno. More to the point, I want to upgrade to GTX580, now my 1st question would be, will there be a respectibly noticable improvment with my current specs? Including i7-930 @ 2.8ghz. Before you reply with z0mg overcl0ckz!!!!! I just want a simple yes or no answer, will i see improvment or will the CPU REALLY bottleneck to the point where im better off keeping the GTX 480? Btw my aim is to play BF3 on max settings possibly with 4x AA. Will it happen?

EDIT: Yes i have tried OCing, tried pretty much every combination and the ones that were stable, still give me a temp of over 80 degrees, and I haven't got so much disposable income to afford a £70 cooler. . .

 

[SMOKEU]

A GTX480 is still a very good GPU. I really don't think that it's worth upgrading your video card at the moment unless you're playing at super high resolutions or using more than 1 monitor. You will see a frame rate increase by upgrading to a GTX580 but I personally don't think it's worth it at this stage.

Save up till you can get a good cooler for your i7 and overclock it to 4GHz if possible.

 

[Lengalicious]

Thanks for the reply, what cooler would you recomend?

EDIT: Actually, would it be worth jumping from I7-930 to the i2600? Will i notice a performance boost in games without upgrading GPU?

 

[SMOKEU]

You should keep your i7 930 as upgrading it to a newer processor won't give you huge gains in performance at the moment. Have a look at the Prolimatech Megahalems or some of the Thermalright coolers like the Venomous X or the True. They will do a very good job of keeping your i7 cool.

With your dual monitor setup are you basically having the same image on both monitors or a different image on different monitors?

 

[Lengalicious]

2 different images on each monitor, but when i play games i dont spread it across both, i only use the one monitor, however im selling them both and just getting a single 24" monitor. . So yeh, if its a performance dip, wont be an issue much longer.

 

[SMOKEU]

If you're just gaming on a single 24" monitor (I'm assuming it will be 1080p) then the i7 overclocked to around 4GHz with the GTX480 will make a great combo.

 

[Theocnoob]

What power supply are you running? Are you certain nothing is overheating- mainly your GPU?

You should be able to run anything current on high settings. Witcher 2 should run at high framerates with everything on ultra. Might bog down a bit since your CPU is at such a low clock though, and you should set it to 4Ghz (read the how to oc your i3/5/7 guide).

My guess is overheat or insufficient power. Make sure you are on the latest driver update btw. Makes a difference.

 

[Knufire]

You have a 480, but you can't afford a high end cooler?

The only thing I see wrong with that is the low clocked CPU.