Value in upgrading e5300 cpu to q6600

M

michilius

Weaksauce
Joined
Jan 18, 2012
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All,
First post on hardforum...

I have a dell slim tower with an e5300 and a low profile 6670 (best low profile I could find), my monitor goes up to 1900x1080. I want to play skyrim and was wondering if upgrading my cpu will effect the gaming dramatically, or if its just a few extra fps?

Thanks!
 
honestly, I don't see the point.

Assuming your mobo would even accept a C2Q, since you're going to be stuck at lower clocks than your current CPU (I don't believe you'll be able to overclock it), you probably wont see too much of an improvement, if any.

To improve the performance, I'd either turn some settings down or build yourself a new machine all together. Not only is the SFF case killing your ability to upgrade, the Dell mobo isn't doing you any favors either.
 
Hi! and welcome to the forum!

I got a E6320 which has 4mb of cache compared to your 2mb
and i got a HD 4770 which has 640 streams processors vs your 480 streams

I'm able to run skyrim 1080p at ultra with shadows at medium and all slider bars maxed.
I'm using the beta patch 1.4. I get an average of 30fps outside and 60 inside.
Before on 1.3 i could only run on medium with sliders towards the lower end and shadows on low.


With your hardware on patch 1.4 you might be able to do high with low shadows.


Your gpu will definetively bottleneck you before your cpu does.
 
Just for your information, Skyrim is based on the Gamebyro engine used back in 2006 and it hasn't really advanced much; Skyrim is optimised for dual core processors so getting a Quad core of the same gen you have now will not help at all. Ironically, a higher clocked dual core may do a better job!
 
Yup, Skyrim is GPU-heavy. At 1080p your video card is the limiting factor.

I ran Oblivion smoothly on a 2.4 GHz Athlon 64. Your CPU is about %50 faster, and you have two of them. Although there's a lot more going on in Skyrim, it's not a mountainous increase in physics calculations, so your CPU should be fine.
 
No you misunderstand, GPU isn't the biggest factor in Skyrim, it's the single core performance because it isn't very well optimised for multithreading.
 
So does your Dell Slim look like this and if it does, get some 4 pin molex to 6 pin adapters for the video card power? Or can't you get a dual slot card to fit anyway or is there exactly 1 slot of room in the Dell Slim? If not any extra 4 pin molex...then just upgrade the PS if necessary, prob not even necessary...Or why not just buy a ATX case gut it all out and drop it in a bigger case for more room, because you want to game. (You need a bigger GPU) so I say yeah you need better GPU with 256-bit bus 1GB or 2GB memory size and hopefully double the stream processing units of your current to theoretically have a significant performance upgrade. So maybe a 6790 or 6850 or whatever your budget allows? Iono if that can apply to your situation or not, just a few ideas I thought about...because I don't think the CPU upgrade you mention will really do anything significant for Syrim...I'd get an MSI GPU or at least download afterburner + on screen and framelimiter + display lock it to 30 or better if you can by use their, for a smooth gameplay experience...but that's kinda beyond the scope here. But anyone who wants to can figure it out, google it etc.
dell_vostro_260s_slim_tower.jpg
 
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The upgrade I did recently was from the 250w PSU and 4350 GPU that came with the computer to a 300w seasonic PSU and sapphire 6670 LP. It's playing starcraft 2 on max setting which I'm very happy with, but it looks like getting skyrim to a reasonable level would require a new mid tower, PSU and GPU rather than a new CPU. Thanks for the advice as I was about to buy a used q6600, which it looks like would provide little to no benefit.

Also, regarding dr.stevils post, the mobo is G41, so it would accept a quad core. And regarding teletran's post, there is only one pci-e slot so no crossfire/sli.

Defaultuser, I'm curious, what GPU do you have?
 
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