Upgrading Graphic Card On My old Computer. Quick Help !

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Rasta_Cook

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Hi,
I bought a new computer recently and gave my old one to my brother, it could play games like league of legends, battlefield 2142, very well, even starcraft 2 very decently (medium quality). It could also play dragon age 2 altho there would be occasional stuttering but still playable... its starting to show its age on the newer games like BF3 / Skyrim which are unplayable ( he had like 5-10fps in bf3 beta with bugs and glitches ) .

Here are the relevant specs of the computer :
- Intel Core 2 duo E6400 ( overclocked to 2.4ghz, i know its a crappy oc but cant do better without losing stability, tried a lot )
- Asus P5WDH Deluxe Motherboard
- Antec EarthWatt 500w ( EA-500 )
- 4gb Ram
- GeForce 9600GT

My brother plans on buying a completely new computer in about 1 year or so, until he can save enough money, but meanwhile he would like to play BF3. Do you think it is possible ?

Here are some graphic cards I was going to recommend :
PowerColor HD 6870 ( 150$ CAD )
MSI HD 6950 twin frozr III ( 200$ CAD )
Gigabyte GTX 560 ( 155$ )

The plan would be to get 1 graphic card now, then when he is ready to buy his new computer, get a second card and put them in sli / crossfire. Apparently the HD 6xxx series scales better in crossfire than GTXs in SLI ... Also im not sure if this is still true but it seems like the HD 6950s can be converted to HD 6970s (how easy is it) ?

My concern is that i don't know if any of these cards will be enough to run bf3 in his current system ... will the cpu be too much of a bottleneck ? Does he need to get a video card with 2gb memory or will 1gb memory do fine ? Also, does he have enough power ( 500w powersupply should be enough no ? ) Should he just not spend anything now and wait ?

Thanks for your help !
 
Im pretty sure all of those cards would run BF3, at the right resolution and settings. I know the 6870s scale really well. So do the 6950's its really just a matter of how much your willing to spend. If you are only going to have 1 card for a year i would reccomend the 6950 then wait and by the time you buy a new one the price will have dropped to a pretty manageable one.

Some 6950s can be unlocked, I haven't done all that much research but im pretty sure its the ones with 2gb and that are reference designs.
 
the CPU is going to be a major bottleneck in BF3, a newer graphics card is just going to make this more apparent. i upgraded my Q8200 that was overclocked to 2.8 Ghz because it couldn't keep my frame rate over 60 FPS on low with 1 560 Ti. benchmarks i did on my i5-2500k that i crippled to 2 cores at 3.4 ghz would cause my frame rates to dip into the 30's and that is also more than twice as powerful as that C2D your brother has.
 
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thanks for your input.

Frito, so you're saying that BF3 is too cpu intensive and that upgrading the video card alone wouldnt be worth it, even if its temporary ? Are you sure ? ...

the BF3 minimum requirements ask for a dual core at 2.4ghz which is exactly what my brother has, with a decent card added to the mix i was hoping this would allow him to play the game at least with low quality and playable framerate...
 
it might be somewhat playable in single player, multiplayer is going to be pretty bad though.

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1654043

in that thread i did some benchmark runs in multiplayer on one of the least CPU intensive 64 player maps. with my i5-2500k with 2 cores disabled so its a dual core cpu and downclocked to 3.4ghz with turbo shut off i benchmarked this

Frames
19941
Time (ms)
300000
Min
32
Max
115
Avg
66.47

notice the min frame rate of 32 fps. this is due to the CPU bottlenecking my 2x 560 Ti's, when i had a core 2 QUAD Q8200 running at 2.8ghz i got worse performance than even that benchmark run did while running the lowest settings when i had the quad! its also worth noting that the sandy bridge architecture has clock for clock roughly double the FPU performance of the core 2 CPU's witch is why my i5 crippled that far still performed better than my core 2 quad did and that cpu is more than twice as powerful as the duo you have there.

short answer - it will run the game but its going to be barely playable in multiplayer, single player is a bit easier on the system as a whole so it may be better. if you want to save money and get a bit of a performance boost look for someone selling an old card like a 2xx series or 4xx series or eqiv ATi card. i wouldn't waste money on a decent card like a 560 Ti unless you want to at least upgrade that machine to a i3-2100 or eqiv AMD 3x or better core cpu.
 
with that old cpu, you would do better to wait and get a gpu after you get a new pc. an E6400 will struggle to even provide a playable framerate at best in many newer games. BF 3 multi would be a crappy experience and Skyrim would be too slow at settings a gpu like the gtx560 is cable of.
 
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