Looking to upgrade video card on IP35 Pro for BF3

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DarkenReaper57

2[H]4U
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Oct 2, 2003
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Hello everyone,

I've been out of the loop for a while as far as hardware goes. I have a IP35 Pro with an overclocked (water-cooled) Q6600 to 3.4 GHz and a 8800GT and 8 GB of DDR2 memory. With Battlefield 3 on the horizon, I'd like to upgrade enough to play at decent settings.

I think the Q6600 can get me by just fine, but am not certain about the 8800GT. The motherboard only supports PCI-E 1.0 (16x), so would this be a serious issue if I wanted to upgrade to a better GPU? Is my motherboard even capable of using the newer cards?

Any advice is welcome!
 
I had recently upgraded from a 4870 to a 5870 on my rig with the same board.
As Falling Anvil said, they're backwards compatible.
 
I upgraded from a 8800GT to a 5870 on my 750i board with a [email protected] and have been pretty happy with the performance. With that said, you probably will be cpu bottlenecked in BF3. I am cpu bottlenecked in BC2 with my current setup and have been looking at jumping to a 2600k pretty seriously, but may end up waiting for BF3 to come out to get newer stuff.
 
I have the same motherboard. Any graphics card will be compatible to the best of my knowledge (you could put a Radeon 6990 in if you really wanted to) without the motherboard being a bottleneck. The question is what card is a good fit for your CPU.

Unless you're running some multiple screen setup, anything above $200 is probably going to run into limitations from you CPU. I recently upgraded from an 8800GT to a Radeon 6850 and have been very satisfied with it. That said, my system will probably not cope too well with a number of games coming out this year (only a dual core), but hopefully I'll make the switch to Sandy Bridge soon.

If I were buying now, I would probably get a 6950 (can be had for $230-250) and as far as I know they all unlock into 6970s. Might be too much card, but it's a hell of a deal. nVidia's competition (560Ti) just doesn't match the performance stock. And once unlocked/overclocked nothing but the GTX 580 can beat it.
 
used or new 58xx card would be great. Did that myself, got a great deal on a nearly new 5850 because the retail prices are low (the 5xxx series leaving the market).


From personal experience, Id advice against a 460gtx though - I had low gpu usage, stuttering and constantly high DPC latency when I tried one briefly on my P35 board - its a gf104 series thing
 
Awesome, I'm glad to hear that I can still get some gaming life out of this PC before spending $1k or so to upgrade.

That said, will a Q6600 @ 3.4 GHz really be a bottleneck with the newer cards suggested?

Thanks for the information, everyone!
 
DarkenReaper57 said:
Awesome, I'm glad to hear that I can still get some gaming life out of this PC before spending $1k or so to upgrade.

That said, will a Q6600 @ 3.4 GHz really be a bottleneck with the newer cards suggested?

Thanks for the information, everyone!
Click to expand...

Only in BC2 and Civ 5 (but who isn't in Civ 5?) as far as I can tell. (Maybe StarCraft 2, I don't have it) I've been really happy playing at 6048x1080 with that cpu and a single 5870. It's definitely still got some life in it. Dragon Age 2 runs above 30fps with all settings on high, 2xAA/16x AF, dx 11, DoF off, in eyefinity.

Upgrade that GPU and see if you need more, I doubt you will coming from an 8800GT. It's going to be a big upgrade. Going from 2x 8800GT SLI to a 5870 was eye opening.
 
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