Upgrading from Athlon II x2 250 to Phenom 965 BE

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Zen78
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Upgrading from Athlon II x2 250 to Phenom 965 BE

Post by Zen78 »

Hi there!

Im a total novice when it comes to processors (and most hardware) but Im concidering upgrading my CPU. The reason being that I upgraded my GFX+RAM last week, but noticed that instead of graphicslag my processor were bottlenecking my gaming experience. So here I am with a few questions.

First off, here's my specs:

MB: GF615M-P33 (MS 7597)

GFX: EVGA GTX650Ti

RAM: 8GB Kingston @ 1333

CPU: AMD Athlon II x2 250

PSU: 500W

OS: Win 7 Pro 64

Keyboard: An old crappy one with a cord so short it gets in the way of my mousemovements and a spacebar so unsensitive I have to bash it to work. Not relevant at all, just whining a bit...

I use the computer for gaming (mostly, if not only, Diablo 3 atm), watching streams, listening to music and watching movies, often many of these at the same time.

Now to my questions. If I were to upgrade to a AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition will I notice a big difference? The only coparison review I found on the web involving Diablo 3 were: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/dia ... 195-6.html. Now Im running at lowest settings both ingame and in Nvidia control panel and get a whooping 60fps MAX (while idle in town etc) but ~30 fps in combat. The review set the Phenom at an avarege of 112 fps, which must mean that it will be a GREAT upgrade, but please confirm.

As long as Im talking about comparisons, I also found this: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1037/1/. For a ignorant ***** like myself it all looks like greek to me. What Im curious about is this:

The Phenom is running .4GHz faster. Is that much in the world of processors?

It has twice the cores. Is that relevant in my case (as in what I usually use the comp for)? I have NO idea of how the system/games/applications uses multicore processors, but when I searched for it all I could find was that it was great when rendering videos or something, but the general concensus were that for "normal" use it was overkill. Please clarify.

It has 2+6MB L2/L3 cache compared to my current 2MB. Again, no clue of what that means...



Im on a tight budget atm so I can only afford a CPU-upgrade for now, so while recommendations of possible upgrades for new state-of-the-art MB+CPU is appretiated it's not possible. For now I'd settle for enlightenment regarding my questions and confusion

All the best

//Zen
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Major_A
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Re: Upgrading from Athlon II x2 250 to Phenom 965 BE

Post by Major_A »

Several suggestions/observations...

1. Yes you will see better performance in games. Games now are finally getting better at using more CPU cores.
2. Your board is AM3 ready. That doesn't mean that it is right now. If you do decide to update your CPU make sure you flash the latest BIOS with the old CPU installed before you put in the new one. http://us.msi.com/product/mb/GF615M-P33.html#/?div=BIOS
3. Don't get caught up in MHz and GHz. That was something AMD and Intel did in the late 90s/early 00s to "sell" to the uneducated masses.
4. Your GTX 650Ti might not be getting the required voltage and in turn performance suffers. What are the exact specs of your power supply?
5. Since you are a self proclaimed novice I can't stress enough to be careful upgrading the CPU (if you do). Too many times I've seen people bend pins on their AMD processor because they weren't taking their time.
6. I ran across this article a while back and it might help you decide what to do. http://www.ocaholic.ch/xoops/html/modul ... itemid=828
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