» Sun Jul 03, 2011 8:47 am My rig was luckily strong enough to clear the Crysis 2 DX11 jump. However, I'm sure many of you shooter fans here like me are interested in the upcoming Battlefield 3. That game is a different story in terms of power consumption, it may duplicate the effect of Crysis 1 from 2007, if we're lucky.
I was confident enough that my rig would be able to max Crysis 2 in DX11, but with BF3, I have no assurance.
This led me to jump into plans for a major rig upgrade. I'm going to be replacing my CPU, Motherboard, and RAM.
I currently have a Phenom II 955 CPU and I want to replace it with the 6-core or 8-core Zambezi CPU when and if AMD releases it in September. If it is as powerful as many are hoping, then I could have quite a nice performance boost up from the Phenom II 955.
As for the Motherboard, I currently have the AsRock M3A785GXH128M, which is not exactly an extreme board, with twin PCI-Express x16 slots running in x8/x8, so it is bottlenecking my twin cards by just a bit. But the main reason that I need to replace this board is because it cannot support the Zambezi CPU, which will require an AM3+ socket, and this board only has a standard AM3. Compatibility is a bich huh? The replacement that I've got eyes on is the GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD3, which has a nice black theme, and goodies like USB 3.0, dual BIOS, plenty of expansion space, and the AM3+ socket, of course, as well as two PCI-Express x16 slots that operate at x16 each, so I can finally take full advantage of my cards, by about 5% more...
Now the RAM, those small sticks of magic that we just can't game without. I currently have 4 sticks of 2GB 1333MHz DDR3 running in dual channel. It's not really causing any slowdowns that I'm aware of, but as this is going to be a major upgrade, which only happens once every 2 years for me, I have to plan ahead. 8GB is probably enough and I can add more if necessary, so I'll just improve their speed. I figured if it was going to make a solid difference, it would have to be quite a jump, and I have my sights fixed on 2 sticks of 4GB 2000MHz DDR3 dual channel. As for what brand and model, I don't really have any preference. As long as they look decent enough with heat spreaders on them.
This upgrade combo is estimated to cost around the $500 range, depending on the cost of the Zambezi CPU, which as of right now I'm guesstimating it to be in the mid $200 range. This upgrade should be a solid performance boost for my Frankenstein rig, and I recommend this to any of you that are building a new rig or considering a major upgrade as well.
