Recommended Upgrade?

[Deleted]

Hey guys, just wondering if I can get some advice, my mates planning to do an upgrade to his system and I was thinking changing his i3 to an i5 would be the best just wanna get some other opinions?

Here is what he has:

Intel (R) Core (TM) i3 CPU 540@3.07 GHz
NVIDIA Geforce GTX 460
Gigabyte H55M-UD2H

I assume as he has an i3 atm changing it to an i5 would cause no compatiability issues?

[Wries]

No, no compability issues afaik.

What upgrade is the best depends on what he wants to do. Productive applications normally sees the greatest benefit from CPU speed (and tons of RAM, quick hard drive setups and whatnot) and not so much GPU, except for when they do.

Gaming wise, WoW could probably benefit some from the i5 upgrade whereas other games might apprecate an upgrade of the graphics card more.. or upgrading both.

Upgrading the graphics card would be a thing that he possibly could bring into his next computer build whereas the CPU you'd be upgrading with is on an obsolete socket and won't go further on than in his current build.

[Deleted]

It will be pretty much exclusively gaming, WoW and some BF3

I thought the CPU would be his best bet as WoW is a bit of a hog on it, not sure how much it would help in BF though.

[glo]

Hey guys, just wondering if I can get some advice, my mates planning to do an upgrade to his system and I was thinking changing his i3 to an i5 would be the best just wanna get some other opinions?

Here is what he has:

Intel (R) Core (TM) i3 CPU 540@3.07 GHz
NVIDIA Geforce GTX 460
Gigabyte H55M-UD2H

I assume as he has an i3 atm changing it to an i5 would cause no compatiability issues?

Which i5 are you looking at? That i3 he has will actually perform the same as any i5 around the same clock. Games 99% of the time don't utilize more than 2 threads, and hyper threading on a dual core will only hinder performance.

You'll be looking at $300+ for an actual upgrade into the i5 3.3Ghz range in the 1156 line. He'd be better off buying a new motherboard and an i3 2100. Like $230ish total with a cheap mobo.

EDIT: BF3 will see no benefit whatsoever. It's almost entirely GPU dependent, and his video card will bottleneck it waaaay before it even taps into his current CPU's max potential.

[Deleted]

Cheers man, I will pass this info on to him, seems to me it would probs be safer waiting a while and doing a complete new pc?