Will upgrading graphics card help me?

[Teabagterry]

Hi there. I want to upgrade my GPU but am worried that if I go out and spend a couple of hundred on the new card it will make no difference to me due to something else in my system being the problem.

The situation is that I play starcraft 2 at 1920x1080 and ultra graphics in 4vs4 games is going below 10fps. I would like to stay above 40 at all times.

My system is:
AMD Phenom II X4 840
4GB corsair 1333Mhz
Bog standard hard drive
Cit PSU 650W
Sapphire vapor x 5770.
ASRock n68c s ucc. mobo

If I upgraded to the 6970, would this solve the problem? Major thing I worry about is the PCI e1.0 which is like a PCIe 2.0 at only 8x. This wont cause a problem will it? Is there something else in the motherboard that is slowing me down? Even if I put the graphics to low, it drops from 60+ to below 20 in a big battle and it's starting to annoy me. Surely the culprit here is the 5770?

Many thanks guys.

 

[wiinippongamer]

You should be having much higher framerates than that with a 5770, you CPU or GPU is probably overheating and throttling itself down so it don't burn.

First download and install HWmonitor, leit it run in the background while you play SC2, and post max cpu and gpu temps here

 

[x Heavy]

Just one card? You will want to try crossfire.

Or replace the board (And keeping the same socket etc) and then install two big Radeon Cards that will help you in crossfire.

Or simply build a entirely new game system.

The other part of the gaming experience is the server you are playing from and the quality of the connection but mostly you can help yourself greatly with the right path and decision making.

Years ago I endured Novalogic's DFLW with 5 frames a second on a old Copper-mine 800 gig Pentium.

 

[wiinippongamer]

^he shouldn't be getting 10fps on SC2 with a 5770

 

[Teabagterry]

It goes that low in ultra settings in huge 8 player battles but sits at 30-40 usually. Nothing is overheating I got HWmonitor running at all times. Cant run 2 gpus on my motherboard. Maybe a complete rebuild is in order instead of chucking good money after bad. But then I got the 2500/2600k vs bulldozer problem!

 

[cuecuemore]

To play SC2 at 1080p with good framerates you need more CPU and more GPU. I run two heavily overclocked GTX 460s (about 3x the power of 1x 5770) with an X4 965 @4.1 GHz, and I'm heavily CPU bottlenecked at 1080p. If SC2 were optimized for 4 cores, it would be a game that you could run on any quad-core processor with no CPU bottlenecking, but as it is, it runs on a "megathread."(blue post from one of the devs.)

BUT, having said all of that, you would see tremendous improvement with a 6970, as in it would throw the bottleneck onto the CPU 100% of the time.

 

[Teabagterry]

So the AMD Phenom II X4 840 is not good enough for Starcraft 2? The solution to the problem then is just to sell this system and build a 2500k/6970 system, particularly as I am planning to move to a higher res monitor within the next year or so.

Thanks for the info.

 

[wiinippongamer]

Or wait a few weeks for bulldozer benchies and then decide.

 

[BulkZerker]

Or just play on med/high settings? Having a stock clocked 965 here I have a "whopping" 200mhz advantage on you but with a 5770 I'm getting 20FPS during big 8player battles if I remeber. It was enough to play the game effectively for me (even though I hate the game, friend bought it for me sol I played a few rounds with em) so it might be something else holding you back? You put an exclusion in your antivirus for sc2?

 

[wiinippongamer]

or even better don't play that lame unoptimized game