Will I see an upgrade in performance by increasing my memory capacity?

[Glorious Leader]

My current system specs:
amd phenom II x4 black edition 960
sapphire toxic HD 6850
4 gb gskill ripjaws 1600mhz
windows 7 64 bit ultimate edition

I've been told conflicting things with specific regards to memory and Starcraft 2. Will I see an improvement in game performance by increasing memory capacity? Will I see an improvement in SWTOR and/or WOW by increasing memory capacity?

[Ghâzh]

Highly unlikely. Four gigs should be plenty to run the game, OS and necessary background programs just fine. If you are in doubt you can check your memory usage while playing and if you are dangerously close to using all 4Gb, then you might consider it.

[Glorious Leader]

Highly unlikely. Four gigs should be plenty to run the game, OS and necessary background programs just fine. If you are in doubt you can check your memory usage while playing and if you are dangerously close to using all 4Gb, then you might consider it.

In that case then the best performance upgrade on a cost/performance ratio would be new cpu or new gpu? The phenom II is still sitting at stock clock speed and can be toyed aronud with a bit.

[vesseblah]

2-3% max, adding more RAM past 4GB does big fat nothing for most games.

[Zurrah]

Your GPU looks pretty good for running WoW although you can upgrade it or crossfire it if your heart desires. If I were you I would upgrade my processor into a hyper-threaded one.

[vesseblah]

If I were you I would upgrade my processor into a hyper-threaded one.

HT is another thing that does big fat nothing for games and is complete waste of money as an upgrade.

In WoW and all MMOs biggest thing holding you back is the processor. Going for i5-2500K (and suitable mobo) will double framerate in cities and other busy places where the game lags the most.

[Glorious Leader]

HT is another thing that does big fat nothing for games and is complete waste of money as an upgrade.

In WoW and all MMOs biggest thing holding you back is the processor. Going for i5-2500K (and suitable mobo) will double framerate in cities and other busy places where the game lags the most.

That was my understanding as well but I wanted some independant analysis. What should I expect to spend for a suitable mobo for an i5 2500k? Can you recommend any specific models?

[vesseblah]

That was my understanding as well but I wanted some independant analysis. What should I expect to spend for a suitable mobo for an i5 2500k? Can you recommend any specific models?

You can go down all the way to about $200 with H61 and i3-2100 together which will already give pretty nice boost for MMOs.

If you want i5-2500K processor with suitable motherboard that allows overclocking, this one is great choice for budget builders. You can go up from there to about $400 if you want just for the motherboard alone, but there's very little extra you can get for the money spent.

[Milkshake86]

Personally i cant give you any insight on this with out knowing how much RAM you use regularily? Most of the time for myself im at 3.91-4.3 gigs. Lotso crap open always. Now i do shoot a bit higher when UDK and Cryengine are being used. Still w/ your pagefile assuming its optimized which sometimes windows does a shitty job of then you could do damn near same as me w/o losing really much overall performance, this would increase your HDD's loading times a little bit but not significantly. You could always step up to 8gb see how it works out for you. Atleast it is cheap and reusable.

Biggest gain of improvement you will see is a generous overclock of that cpu. 955+ are decent for overclocking, SWTOR should run really well on your setup in general it is not a super demanding game. It's basically WoW with better use of cpu. Graphics on max are not super amazing break your pc graphics.

6850 is not a bad card so it should be fine for a bit atleast. Now if your planning to make the jump to an i5-2500k id go with a good mobo. Something usb/pcie 3.0 ready and capable of taking on an IVY chip. ASRock extreme4 gen3 both p67 and z68 are great options.