Blackfriday dilemma

[qwoz]

I am debating between upgrading my current system with a new graphics card and more ram, vs upgrading during the ibuypower holiday sale.

Current system:
Intel core2 quad Q9400, 2.66ghz OCed to 3.5 ghz
4gig ddr2 800 gskill pi
ATI 5870

I am thinking of upgrading to a 7870 and adding 4 more gigs of ram. Does it make sense to throw down 350$ for the upgrade or should I just get a whole new system ( AMD 8 core, DDR3 ram, 7870) for around 950$ and sell my current system for maybe 400-500 bucks... what is confusing me mostly is if my current processor and ram is the bottleneck in gaming. I can currently run BF3 on high and get mostly 50fps performance.

what seems to be happening in newer games on my current system is it will run smoothly but if I'm getting into an area with alot of other players, when i turn around it will stall for half a second then continue to play smoothly... if that make sense, idk if that helps anyone determine the bottleneck. I also get the worst drop in frames when in heavy smoke or fog situations in BF3.

Thanks and happy thanksgiving!

 

[Deemo13]

BF3 is a hard game to run.

To determine your bottleneck, you need to figure out which component, the GPU or the CPU, has a very high load when gaming.

 

[qwoz]

what is the best way to run cpu logs while im playing a game so i dont have to go to desktop while playing?

 

[Deemo13]

Well, I usually go to the desktop anyway just to get a glimpse of what is happening.

I guess if you can, get MSI Afterburner. Afterburner can set an on-screen display to show how much of your GPU is being used. If the game is lagging and the GPU is still low, its the processor.