Sufficient?

[noobattech]

My rig:
Intel E8400
cool master tx3 cpu cooler
Gigabyte EP45-DS4P motherboard
ATI 6870 Graphic Card
550W Powersupply
8 GB Kingston DDR2 PC6400 800Mhz
1TB WD Green harddrive
320GB WD Blue harddrive
320GB Seagate harddrive
3x120mm case fan
2x200mm case fan
1x140mm case fan
front multi card reader
dvd drive

questions:

1) is my powersupply sufficient?
2) is my powersupply sufficient to handle cpu overclock?
3) should i upgrade my rig? bf3 mw3 (playing at the moment alright sometimes jumps abit)
4) should i just stick with my rig and OC the cpu?
5) where is the weakness in my rig?
6) i try cpu OC but it won't boot up or get to the boot up menu what's up? even slight increase won't boot up. is it cause my powersupply isn't sufficient?
7) how big should my powersupply be?

cheers

 

[o1die]

What brand, model number, and 12v rail rating in amps is your power supply. The wattage isn't the only factor to consider when overclocking.

 

[rndmavis]

To answer what I believe is your big question of where is your bottleneck (performance wise) would be your processor. I'll give two examples from personal experience with my own builds.

I do know that you are having issues OCing your system which more info is needed as o1die said.

1) I was using a Q6600 with a 8800 gts when that setup was decent. It became outdated so I upgraded to a 9800GTX, kept the same cpu. The strange thing with this this upgrade was I didn't see ANY performance increase while gaming. I knew I had a bottleneck somewhere. I firstly assumed it was my CPU; I was right. I OC'd it a bit and saw a considerable increase in gaming performance.

Let's look at a very recent example that very closely relates to your current setup.

2) Just two weeks ago, I had an i7 930 at 2.8ghz (stock) with a single 5850. In BF3, I was getting 25-35 FPS on High with low AA, SBAO, etc. I decided to OC my CPU. I got it to 3.8 pretty quickly and decided to try BF3 again and WOW was I surprised.... On these same game settings I was pushing 50+ FPS in some areas of the game. Not 50+ average, but a very significant increase from stock settings. I would say the difference was near night and day. These are all multiplayer results BTW. It was still unplayable on ultra and max AA.

So my second example we an have i7 930 which is a faster cpu than yours and with a 5850 which is of course slower than yours. I was bottlenecked from my CPU. One thing I would be concerned about is that your GPU should be able to handle more of the processing than my 5850, so the bottleneck may not be as extreme as mine. Mileage may very.

 

[noobattech]

is my powersupply sufficient enough? is my main concern.

dunno about the brand or model number for my cpu.

would overclocking it be good enough or should i get new cpu?

thanks for the response.