Opinion Needed On CPU Upgrade Gains

Salutations Geeks!

I currently have an Asus A8N-E motherboard with an AMD 64 4200+. I was going to upgrade soon but I wanted to know if just installing a dual core CPU might be a nice stopgap measure. Maybe, say, an AMD dual core 5800? Would the gain be worth the money and time swapping the CPU?

Reference for my expectations are on the humble side. For example, I love the game Company of Heroes. I don't play much because I have to turn down a few of the bells and whistles. Not a big deal, and I guess I am happy with the way it runs, I just have a bunch of other games that run better I can play in the meantime. Acceptable performance for me is a constant 30 fps or so. I would not mind playing some Supreme Commander as well.

So, any opinions? Or should I just wait a bit longer and do a complete rebuild. I would not by cutting edge hardware, as a result I was thinking a processor upgrade might hold me out another year.

Thanks for any input.

 

my suggestion would be to upgrade your graphics card to hold you over. Your system specs are still pretty nice otherwise. A graphics card could move with you to any new system. Your CPU would not.

 

That thought had crossed my mind - but many of today's new games recommend dual core processors. Supreme Commander for example. I wonder how much a video card upgrade could compensate for dual processor power?

 

Here is some info for you. this is from the conclusion (page 6) of this 2006 article http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reports/p4d_gaming/

another review in 2007 found in the conclusion here http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/video/dualcore.html

In your current system, its certainly your graphics card and RAM holding you back the most. Sure a faster CPU would yeild some gains, but not nearly as much as a better graphics card would.

Granted, performance increase is LARGELY based on the games you play. If you do choose a CPU upgrade, the only worthwhile option in my opinion would be a dual core Opteron 175 or higher (socket 939 of course), that you can Overclock to ~3ghz or higher in some cases, all on Air. But again, your RAM is going to be a bottleneck in this scenario.

 

What graphics card are you currently using? Ram?

That should help the discussion.