Xps 625

[Funballs]

ok so two years ago i wasted my money on a XPS 625. I love it but i found out how much cheaper it could have been if i built it myself.....anyway i was looking to upgrade it, i play MW3, TF2, LoL, SC2, and soon to play Battlefield 3 and The Old Republic. most games run decent but MW3 is sluggish at times and in the beta TOR was quite choppy.

i notice that my CPU runs at 100% or close to when running MW3 and TOR, so its my assumption that its my CPU making the games run sluggish. i was wondering what upgrades are possible to make said game run smoothly.

oh yeah on an average night i have google chrome up with lots of tabs, itunes and skype.

express service code: 110 685 120 49

Phenom 8750 triple core

8GB memory

Radeon HD 4800 series 512MB (seems a little low, Yes?)

and idk how to find the board brand/model.

any help would be greatly appreciated. thanks in advance.

 

[jonnyp11]

all depends on the current components and the budget, need to know that to know what needs to be upgraded.

 

[Funballs]

i downloaded cpu-z and for MB it shows:

Manufacturer: Dell Inc.
Model: 0P927G
AMD 790x

GPU: Radeon HD 4850 512MB

CPU: AMD Phenom X3 8750 Black Edition

im assuming that if i did need to upgrade the CPU i would be screwed because its AM2+ socket?

not really sure what to tell you on a budget because I'm not sure what is going to need replacement. i don't really want to spend more than 2 or 300 but if i have to then i have to.

 

[jonnyp11]

for the cpu idk how good the 8750 is but you can get a phenom ii x4 940. but you can always grab a 6850 on the lower end or a 6950 in the upper end of your budget and see how it performs before deciding.

 

[JaredC.]

Make sure you have a powerful enough psu to handle any of these upgrades. and yes 512MB of VRAM will not get by with much these days, 1GB seems to be the new minimum in the VRAM department.

 

[Funballs]

I'm almost 100% sure i have a 750 psu.

i was looking at the 6950s and found an article that reviewed 3 of them with Gigabyte coming out on top although only by an extremely small margin.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125385&Tpk=Gigabyte%27s%20GV-R695OC-1GD

this is the card they tested. when looking at GPU what do you have to look at to see if it is compatible?

 

[jonnyp11]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102945

the only thing that makes that card faster is the overclock, which you can easily do by changing a few numbers with msi afterburner. but this one will be better because of its 2gb's of vram, which nowadays games are taking more advantage of and want more than the 1gb of that card.

 

[Funballs]

well i dont know the first thing about overclocking anyway, all i know about computers is what ive had time to read and figure out on my own. I'm hoping that this will take care of the problem.

I'm actually planning on getting Crysis 2 shortly and i would like to play it on the settings it was made for and from what I've seen my pc wouldn't be able to handle it in its current state.

 

[jonnyp11]

It can play it now, just not very well. If you get this gpu and the phenom ii 940 it should be able to max almost every game out there or very close to it.

 

[Funballs]

i think for now I'm going to see what the GPU can do first then ill look into getting a CPU. I've found the 940s on eBay from 50-110. only place i know to look since newegg doesn't carry anymore.

 

[Funballs]

thanks for the help guys i appreciate it.