Bang for Buck Upgrade advice

[Mccaula718]

I'm looking at doing some upgrades for my aging system listed below. I would like to play BF3 on as high of settings possible at 1920x1080. As you can see from my current system, i don't upgrade often but when i do its with cheap and highly overclockable items. I would like to keep this upgrade as cheap as possible without sacrificing performance so please do not suggest the almight 2500k or 2600k. I plan on purchasing most items from forums.

I was thinking personally a phenom II x4 or x6 and a 560 ti or 6950. i would like to spend around 125 for the cpu(have am3 mobo and 8gb ram waiting) and around 200 for the video card.

 

[Maplehamwich]

If all you want is BF3 quality and performance, you're probably ok with and AMD CPU. If you want to do other things, you may not be.

I'd highly suggest, if you haven't already, getting your bearings with HardOCP's BF3 evaluations. They'll give lots of insight into VideoCard options.
http://hardocp.com/article/2011/11/22/battlefield_3_multiplayer_performance_iq_review/1

This will be of interest to you for BF3 CPU performance.

http://www.techspot.com/review/458-battlefield-3-performance/

On the CPU side of things, we found that Battlefield 3 is not nearly as CPU demanding as many have made it out to be. Previously tested games, such as Hard Reset, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, The Witcher 2 and Crysis 2, saw a massive difference in performance between dual and quad-core processors. For example, in Deus Ex dual-cores were 43% slower than their quad-core counterparts. Battlefield 3 on the other hand delivered similar frame rates with a decent dual-core as it did with a quad.

Having that said, we prefer the peace of mind of the quad-core as the game will max out a Phenom II X2. According to our tests a Phenom II X4, FX-4000 series CPU and even the Athlon II X4 will provide very similar performance with the same level of CPU utilization.

On that same note, we were surprised by the average performance of the FX-4100 (for a quad-core) or the 8-threaded FX-8150, which appeared to be considerably less efficient than the Core i7-2600K. As we recently found out when testing AMD’s new Bulldozer CPUs, the Core architecture of the Sandy Bridge processors remain faster and more efficient and this was again evident when testing with Battlefield 3.

also:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/battlefield-3-graphics-performance,3063-13.html

 

[Mccaula718]

Thanks for those links. I think i'm going to go with the phenom II x6 and try to find an affordable 6950

 

[Hamm3r]

I have a 1090T and 6950 1GB and I can run full Ultra (except AA, 2x there) in BF3 at 50-70fps.

 

[Dangman]

This will be of interest to you for BF3 CPU performance.

http://www.techspot.com/review/458-battlefield-3-performance/
also:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/battlefield-3-graphics-performance,3063-13.html

Unfortunately none of those links help at all if you're talking about BF3's MP performance. As noted throughout the community, BF3's MP performance is completely different from BF3's SP performance. Since the two above reviews test using the SP game, they don't help if trying to grade BF3's MP performance.

This is a more viable comparison as it is of BF3's MP (it's in Swedish but google translate helps):
http://www.sweclockers.com/artikel/14650-prestandaanalys-battlefield-3/5#pagehead