Current setup: Intel Core i5 750 2.66Ghz (Lynnfield) (Socket LGA1156) Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2 Corsair 4GB (2x2GB) Dominator DDR3, PC3-8500F (533) XFX ATi Radeon HD5850 Samsung 256GB SSD 830 Notebook/Apple Series SATA 6Gb/s KIT with Norton Ghost - (MZ-7PC256N/EU) Corsair hx 520W PSU The max resolution I can game at is 1920 x 1200. I do NOT want to overclock the CPU/ GFX card as in my experience it always leads to stability issues and crashing especially in Battlefield. I was hoping maybe just a ram (4gb more) and GPU (280X) upgrade would be enough to max the game at 1920 x 1200. I was hoping to do this within a budget of £300: -would I be heavily bottlenecked by my CPU? If yes, could I upgrade my CPU only to the highest possible with my motherboard without having to upgrade everything? -would my current PSU be able to power the new GFX card without any probs? Alternatively (the route I ideally dont want to take) would be a full system overhaul including MOBO, CPU, RAM, GFX and may require PSU also.
I'm guessing something like a GTX 770 or a Radeon R9 280X plus another 4GB of RAM would be your best bet. I'm a bit out of the loop when it comes to this sort of thing, but I suspect GorkedWings19 will be along sometime after midnight with a conclusive suggestion.
-I would agree that 4gb more RAM would help a great deal (I have 8gb and run on high settings) - I have the next i5 up from you (I think) - i5 760 @2.80 GHz (Lynnfield) and run at about 50 fps so maybe getting a slightly newer one wouldn't hurt (Obviously, keeping price in mind) Also, does your motherboard support crossfire? Maybe that could be an option
I generally don't overclock my GFX card as I find the gains very minimal and not enough to justify the effort. CPU, however, is a different story. My old 2600K went from 3.2 to 4.5 GHz by changing 2 (I think) settings in the BIOS and it's totally stable. Just make sure you run a stress test. If it passes an hour of THIS then you're good. And it does make a noticeable difference.
I had a single gtx670 setup so I bought another one of those and sli'd instead of upgrading to a higher spec single GPU card. the single gpu upgrade path was a more expensive option but the SLI gave me a much higher performance boost. is it a viable option for you to do a xfire upgrade?
It will but I've been having to dial down a couple of settings in some new games recently and I've always said that once that starts happing it's time for an upgrade
