Hardware Upgrades – Don’t Forget Your CPU

As I’ve mentioned before in passing, my personal computer is fitted with a GeForce 8800GTS video card, a Core 2 Duo E6550 @ 2.33 GHz, and 2 gigs of DDR2 667MHz RAM, and has been for about two and a half years. While the only PC game I’ve been playing a lot lately has been the Starcraft 2 Beta, which is not very hardware intensive, it still bothers me on occasion when some of my other favorites (Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead) aren’t comfortably playable at their maximum graphics settings. This fact, combined with a stewing plan to purchase a 24-inch widescreen LCD and the accompanying screen resolution increase, led to my decision to upgrade my video card. Who wants to have to back down graphics settings when you’ve just gotten a large, 1080p monitor?

It took several weeks of hemming, hawing, research, and shopping, but with a budget of $200, give or take, I finally decided that I would make the jump to an XFX Radeon HD 4890. This was an interesting choice for me, as I’ve never owned an XFX product before, and I had also forsaken ATI (or now AMD) video cards a few years ago when I had been forced to replace the stock cooler of a non-overclocked Radeon X700 due to overheating, and it still overheated on occasion. My mind was changed when I looked at the current landscape of the graphics adapter market and found that NVIDIA products are, in general, too expensive for what they offer; benchmarks showed that the Radeon HD 4890 generally outperformed the GeForce GTX260 in roughly the same price point, all the while NVIDIA’s better performers were simply outside my budget.

This is where the mistake was made. I purchased the video card (from Tiger Direct, who got it to me two days after the order was placed, and with free shipping to boot – nice!) and installed it, and soon realized that my CPU is disproportionate! While the framerate boost was noticeable, my aged Core 2 Duo is bottlenecking performance and leaves me only able to bump up some graphics settings in my games – not the kind of performance I could be getting out of this 4890.

Due to Intel’s new sockets for the new Core i3/i5/i7, the LGA 1156 and LGA 1366, I won’t just drop a new processor in my existing motherboard; I’d just be upgrading to an already outdated Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Quad. While I hadn’t been looking originally to begin a new build, this has been what it’s turned into: a new video card turned into a new CPU turned into a new motherboard turned into new RAM and a new power supply! All from wanting to move up to a 24-inch monitor, which is now on the back burner.

What can you learn from this? If your gaming computer is aging and you want to pep it up, don’t just upgrade your video card; your CPU will hold you back. If it’s not in your budget to do what it takes to upgrade both CPU and GPU, wait until it is! You’ll see a bigger performance improvement and be much more satisfied with your upgrade if you do it all at once.