Ok, so I know Turis has a setup similar to mine. How much of a difference should I expect by dropping my e8600 dual core for a shiny new q9550?  Also the bitch is starting to heat up and crash a couple times a day (I think it was from all that massive overclocking I did a few years ago on it-its all back to stock now). 

Also i'm still running ye old 8800GTS 640 for the video card, I know that its quite dated now by video card standards.  

Who wants to give me a recommendation for a new vid card in the $200 range or less? 

Is this path worth it to keep me afloat for the next few years or should I say fuck it and just keep riding the crap out of this rig til it pukes its guts out all over my floor?

yeah but your graphics card is much better and his current cpu is currently already at the same fsb and actually higher ghz than the q6850. The E8600 is 3.33ghz. so he wouldn't get that jump. he might get a minor increase just by having a quad but not worth it IMO, but if your squeezing it out then sure. I would bet he might get 10fps faster from quad originally seeming faster until their patch but anything else will actually be slower to clock unless it uses full quad core.

So essisially he's losing 333mhz (6-7fps alone) than what he has now. Being with the graphics card he has I wouldn't do it. If he had a 9800 like you have then it might be a little to look at as it would push that card better in conjunction.

basically you went from 2.6ghz 1066fsb to 3ghz 1333 fsb with a 9800 card which will give you that boost.

Going from 3.33ghz 1333fsb to 3ghz 1333 fsb with 8800 card won't be near as good and will only benifit a little in BC2 because it works just a touch better with quads for some reason than duals, specially since that dual core patch that they released.

i have a 8800 gts also.

on low settings, i was getting about 30 frames with my dual core.

on medium, i'm getting a solid 45 frames with the quad core.

a .3 ghz increase didn't cause all of that frame rate increase.

know anyone else who has upgraded a dual core to a quad core besides me who might agree that the game runs better on a quad?


and sknnr can always overclock the shit out of the cpu if he wants, without touching the fsb.it has an unlocked multiplier.

if he just bumps the multiplier to 9.5 from 9 and ups the fsb by 14, he's running at  3.3 ghz without having to really overclock anything. if he bumped his multiplier to 10 and left the fsb alone altogether, he'd be at 3.3 ghz. 

for the amount of money he's spending and i've spent, its a good deal. it will last at least a year, if not longer, before anything taxes my cpu, and with the quad, he's not instantly bottlenecked because its running with half the cores its designed to use.

 uh, no.

i was at 1333mhz the whole time.

dude, seriously, i think i know if i have better performance with a quad core. 

it's definitely omg huge difference.

Get the proc. I run e8400 dual core with a 8800GT and can run on all high in the 30-50s if I wanted to. 8800s are still good enough to run this game on decent FPS as long as you have a good proc.