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My cpu seems to be a bottleneck.?

My current computer, Is a gigabyte ep45 ud3p, with a intel e7400 overclocked to 3.53, a xfx 4850 512mb, 3gb ram, corsair 650. Everytime I run the programs that tell you what games you can run my cpu is always the bottleneck. I want to up grade to a quad core any advice on what to get around 170 dollar range. thanks and god bless

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  • dik b
    Lv 6
    1 decade ago
    Favorite Answer

    I presume you are looking to game with this setup.

    The CPU you currently have is quite fine for just that. With out changing the motherboard, RAM and video, you don't have a huge range of options. DDR2 RAM, 4850, P45 board.

    Gigabyte says you can go with the QX9xxx Core 2 Extreme or Q8XXX or Q9xxx Core 2 Quad series. The pricing and availability of these depends on how you plan on getting one. Web pricing has to include shipping to be a fair comparison.

    FWIW, you won't see all that big a jump in gaming performance with a quad core. While more games are multi-core capable, the developers can't reasonably design for much more than 2 as the uptake of quads is really quite low. You would probably be better off with an E8xxx series chip.

    The bigger bang for the buck would be to get a Radeon 5000 series GPU. The performance boost here is quite noticeable. You should see a 20 to 30 % increase across the board. Oh , yes the RAM on video should be at least 1 GB.

    Other than this save your shekels and bits and bobs for a total system.

    Good luck.

    Source(s): Gigabyte CPU list: http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support/Motherboard/CPU... Steam hardware survey: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/cpus/ N.B. I grant you that the quad uptake was larger than I thought but still lags quite a bit behind the single cores which are mostly quite old.
  • Anonymous
    1 decade ago

    Getting a quad core vs a dual or single core will not necessarily increase your performance in game. Multiple cores only improve performance on game that are actually built to make use of the extra cores or on certain multimedia tasks.

    That being said, it might be work buying a dual core and overclocking it quite a bit with good cooling...

    I would go with the Core 2 Duo E8400

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...

    Overclock it if your up to it.. you'll do just fine

  • 1 decade ago

    What exactly are these programs saying? An E7400 at 3.53GHz is quite a capable gaming CPU and any program that says different is likely confused or broken.

  • Adrian
    Lv 7
    1 decade ago

    Quad core will not speed up games. Most games use only one core (one CPU), they are not written for multi-cpus.

    A dual core is ok, as the OS tends to use one while the game uses the other. Anything more is wasted for gaming

    Source(s): Have core i7, and with WoW, uses only 2 cores (one real core and one HT core) when game is running - even that is at 60-70% maximum... Other 6 cpu/HT threads are idle
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