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Upgrading Video Card/CPU


GPU/CPU/  

9 members have voted

  1. 1. Which is the best choice for me?

    • Upgrade my video card.
      7
    • Upgrade my CPU
      2


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Okay, so I want to be able to run Skyrim on max settings with the fxaa injector and some other mods installed at least at 30 fps or greater. I am looking at upgrading my video card however I'm not sure if this would help my situation very much as I don't know too much about computers. Currently, I have a slew of mods installed and the ones that might affect my performance are ones like HD texture packs, and the fxaa injector. Skyrim auto detects my graphics to high but I set them on medium settings and am able to run the game at around 25 fps with some minor drops occasionally. These are my system specs:

 

EDIT: Some additional specs: http://svc.systemrequirementslab.com/CYRI/analysis.aspx?name=The-Elder-Scrolls-V:-Skyrim&id=11231&session=e24a1b13-e5bb-44ad-a982-361ad43b6950

 

Manufacturer: Gateway

Model: DX4300

5.9 Windows Experience Rating

AMD Phenom II x4 805 processor 2.5 GHz

Ram: 8.00 GB (7.75 Usable)

Windows 7 64 Bit

Video Card ATI Radeon HD 5570

 

I have a budget of about $200. I was thinking about upgrading to the HD 6850 but I don't know if this will help my situation.

TL;DR- What am I looking at in the way of upgrades? Any help or advice on the subject would be much appreciated! Thanks!

Edited by GreyFox113x
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Your video card is OK. I would really suggest though you upgrade your CPU, because assuming you are gaming that is going to be a big factor in overall performance. GPU's can always be upgraded later, and they are easy but a good CPU is the backbone of your computer. And while the one you have isn't terrible, it could be better, and for $200 you could get 1050 phenom 2 or just an 840.
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I would not go with a CPU if I were you. CPUs have little impact on todays games. The Radeon HD 6850 that you were looking at in the orignal post would have more of an impact on system performance for Skyrim.

 

Edit: To further explain my reason, in a computer tech class a couple months ago, my teacher was giving a brief lesson on overclocking to make the class aware of it. He had given us a table that showed the impact of increasing the speed of the CPU or GPU on games and the more recent the game title, the less impact the faster CPU made while the faster GPU would affect the game more. CPU would see a 5% increase maximum in frames per second while the GPU would have a 24% increase on the DirectX 10 and 11 test while with the DirectX 9 test, the GPU was passing the workload to the CPU because the GPU wasn't even getting a 5% workload so a faster CPU helped there. Even if you do not plan to overclock, the same concept can still be applied to the decision of upgrading the CPU or GPU.

Edited by Vecna6667
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GPU, your CPU is fine. If you know how to overclock, get it to at least 3.0GHz and you'll see a nice jump in performance ;) Oh wait...Gateway lol. Most big box pre-builts have their BIOS locked and/or have limited options, you might not be able to OC it. But, yeah...
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its real simple, install all you want to install and run skyrim whit it, use some monitoring software to watch what is your bottleneck. i use Aida for excample, it can clearly show you if your gpu or cpu is at 100% and bottleneckin rest system. Bear in mind that if your CPU and GPU not overclocked yet then you can get about 15% better performance whit cpu and atleast 10% whit gpu that way, whitout spending single buck ;D
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its real simple, install all you want to install and run skyrim whit it, use some monitoring software to watch what is your bottleneck. i use Aida for excample, it can clearly show you if your gpu or cpu is at 100% and bottleneckin rest system. Bear in mind that if your CPU and GPU not overclocked yet then you can get about 15% better performance whit cpu and atleast 10% whit gpu that way, whitout spending single buck ;D

 

as illiad said, he prolly wont be able to overclock since his is a prebuilt big company system (Gateway)

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