Originally Posted by DarkJak

Other than some rts games, it's usually a gpu bottleneck. Also the gtx 275 can't run all the games totally maxed out at playable framerates, which is why he may upgrade. Going from 30 to 40 is already a noticeable difference in smoothness.

The 400 series won't be bottlenecked by the quad core, especially if you can overclock it. Which one is it? Model number.


If you aren't gaming all the newest games though, your build is fine.

An ssd will show the most improvement IMO. Cuz harddrives are usually what slows computers down now. Not as helpful in gaming, but oh so nice everywhere else. But I don't recommend them right now cuz of the price, which hasn't fallen as fast as most people expected.

What's the size of your power supply? You'll need a larger one for a gtx 470/480.
If you want to max out games with AA and dx11, the 400's are better than the ati 5000's tier to tier. The ati's have more raw power but nvidia probably put the r&d into solving AA intensiveness. At least that's how the benchmarks look when the ati cards lose double the framerate with AA vs nvidia.

When I upgraded a new mobo+CPU+ram, I only noticed a 5% increase in framerates. It was a huge upgrade too. Cost about 600 bucks for it all, didn't skimp. Those won't be the best bang/buck unless you are running on a 5 yr old build.

Originally Posted by Organ

the athlon II x2 240 is what i have voxus, it's overclocked to 3.8ghz, it's really good for a dual core amd processor. most core 2 quads outperform todays amd quads in performance tests so yea i would say your quadcore would do excellent with a better graphics card behind it, like what darkjak suggests

side note here: games that rely on physics engines other than physx by nvidia tend to be really slow on dual cores and triple cores. one example is GTA IV. very poorly cpu optimized game because it runs the euphoria physics engine. most average quadcores should get above 40 fps where as a cpu like mine gets 30 fps ingame on average