What's the bottle neck in my system

[Lemon Jelly]

My current setup is
Mobo: Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P
CPU: quad core q6600 2.4GHz (not overclocked)
Ram: 8gigs of kingston DDR2 800
GPU: GTX 260 core 216 SSC
PSU: PC Power & Cooling 610W
Two sata hard drives and 3 case fans.
Monitor:Hanns G 27.5 at 1920x1200

looking to burn a little money but not sure what to upgrade.
My ideas were (4890,SSD, or a good CPU heatsink) maybe different ram? Would there be much difference between cheap ram and "gamer ram" if they were both DDR2 800?
any thoughts would be appreciated.

 

[hunter315]

What isnt the system doing that you would like it too? Are you not getting frame rates as high as you would like? Are loading times longer than you want? Are programs not running as quickly as you would like?

As long as the have the same speed and the same timings there will be no differences between the ram, and even so the difference will be minimal.

 

[toosober]

The video card and processor should be fine. Your bottleneck is your hard disk. An SSD will definitely make your system fly.

 

[Lemon Jelly]

What isnt the system doing that you would like it too? Are you not getting frame rates as high as you would like? Are loading times longer than you want? Are programs not running as quickly as you would like?

As long as the have the same speed and the same timings there will be no differences between the ram, and even so the difference will be minimal.

its mostly for gaming, actually COD4 is pretty much all i play. I get around 70-85 FPS indoors but maps like over grown and bigger maps, i start to dip to low 50s which makes me stutter even the sound stutters some times too. Like the announcer will say "UA AA V onli" then stops or when strafing i get some stuttering. This is after optimizing the mp.data. I play at 1920x1200 everything at max but no AA and no AF i would also like to put those to the max. But in general looking to improve FPS in all my games.

 

[hunter315]

Okay if sound is stuttering then you probably need to OC your CPU
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835207004
That one gets rated pretty high and should give you some head room to overclock.

 

[Lemon Jelly]

Okay if sound is stuttering then you probably need to OC your CPU
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835207004
That one gets rated pretty high and should give you some head room to overclock.

cool, thank you for the info

 

[Outlander_04]

The video card and processor should be fine. Your bottleneck is your hard disk. An SSD will definitely make your system fly.

an ssd could improve boot times and game loading times . It wont have any effect on game play or the running speed of applications .

game stuttering from high frame rates , is more likely to be a driver issue OR a back ground service using resources and starving the game .

Use msconfig to shut down all the programs that want to automatically start , but are not part of windows . If you want them open just click on them when you do .
Leave all the windows components , your antivirus and firewall running . Turn everything else off and be amazed how quickly you boot

Try disabling your antivirus while gaming .