Upgrade the graphics card or new system?

Dinoslawski

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Sep 20, 2011
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Greetings tom's hardware community, new kid on the block here. How are you? Fantastic! 😛

But enough of chit-chat, lets get down to business. Right now I own Shuttle XPC SP35P2, Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600, GF 8800 GTS 512MB, 4GB DDR2 800 ram. It's about 3, almost 4 years old rig so I've been thinking of course about getting a new one.

Now, to get something decent I would need to spit out about 700-800€ (yes, I live in Euro zone), which is a lot of money. Now my current system, well, it can still run latest games to be honest, just not maxed out. So I've been thinking about only upgrading graphics card, with something like Radeon HD 6850 1GB (Shuttle says my XPC can handle even 6870). That, along with some OCing (and investing a bit of money in to cooling) - would that have big impact on performance in games? Or would new graphics card be held back by other (a bit outdated) components?

If it would improve my FPS and enable me to play on higher settings, I would be happy. It would basically extend life of my current PC by another year or two.

Since consoles are holding back PC gaming technology for some years now, I don't really see enough of justification to shall out 800€ for new rig. Sure, it would be nice if I could max out Skyrim and BF3, just not sure if it's worth that much money - I'm not the geek I use to be 😛

Thank your for baring with me and thank you for any help,
Dinoslawski
 
If you don't want to spend 800 euros for a new comp you can buy a gtx 560 Ti, which is around 200 euros and will definetly boost your performance.
 
get a new gpu and a cooler on the side if you own the stock cpu cooler, overclock that cpu to 3.2 and you can still run everything maxed out.
 
Im actually using a 560Ti and q6600 at 3.2 ghz.
I went there from 2 4850 in crossfire and i got a very nice boost in games.
My plan is to wait for bulldozer and then decide if i go SLI or get a new gpu like 7000 generation from ATI.

So my advice is: either wait a bit till new generations come out, or get a gpu that will be good once you upgrade the whole system.

Just check you PSU to make sure it can handle everything.