Worth upgrading ? Or wait for SB?

[Topper]

I have the following rig -

GA-EP35-DS3L
E8400
8800GT Alpha Dog
4GB Gskill
Earthwatts 500w

My friend wants it to game with, mainly he plays WoW but a few RTS games as well.

I know this setup with play WoW fine but gets bogged down occasionally during raids with alot going on. Usually 60fps on a 22" @ 1680x 1080. Sometimes setting have to be lowered to maintain frames.

Worth upgrading the GPU so he can have all the settings maxed on the new WoW expansion coming ?

He also wants to upgrade the cpu to something like a Q9xxx but I don't think he's going to get much more from that.

All stock atm btw.

Upgrades worth it ? Or should he stick it out till first of the year and not waste money ?

Thoughts?

 

[daveybrat]

I would upgrade the video card to a Nvidia GTX 460, that'll be a huge upgrade over what he has now.

A 3.0GHz Core2Duo is still fine for games. He wouldn't notice a big enough increase over what he has right now. I would do the video card first, that way when he upgrades his processor and motherboard, he can re-use the 460.

 

[Zargon]

guess that depends on if the wow update inclues better multicore scaling. BC2 and MOH do it quite well, as do others

but certainly his main bottlneck is that GPU!

 

[power_hour]

^^^ GPU is definitely the bottleneck. If your friend only plays WOW and a few RTS, might I suggest a used ATI HD4890.

I have almost identical specs. I went from a 8800GT to HD4890 and found WOW to run great for 5-man dungeons and RTS games. Even BFBC2 runs decent at 1920x1080 settings on my new LCD.

 

[Topper]

Thanks for the replies guys.

Pretty much inline with what I was thinking.

I'm going to suggest a GPU upgrade. HD 4890 or a GTX 460.

With the new 6xxx series coming out this week the next couple weeks leading up to BF should be a great time hopefully for some GPU price breaks.