Kings setup, up to date?

[DuVeL]

Right, King needs to know if his current PC is still up to date. He just got him and Brian (mini_King) BF4 and has encounterd long loading times.
I told him to get an SSD drive but I'm not sure what to recommend.

His current specs:
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6300  @ 1.86GHz (2 CPUs), ~1.9GHz
4096MB RAM
AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series

Any suggestions are welcome.

[TeaLeaf]

As well as the SSD upgrade, moving to 8MB RAM would help too (BF4 recommend 8MB with 4MB listed as minimum - minimum to my mind always means it will play, but you'll not like the results) and RAM upgrades are quite a cheap option generally.

However, a bigger problem might be the CPU.  It is quite old and I suspect that the CPU is getting bottlenecked, so you might want to think about a more considerable upgrade.  I just upgraded my system from an X6800 (because it was bottlenecking my system) and the new CPU has been a breath of fresh air.    If your CPU is getting raped, then upgrading the RAM and SSD will be nice but they won't solve the bottlenecking.

BF4 has a minimum recommended CPU of an i5 from the Intel range and even the slowest i5 is considerably faster than the E6300, so for my money I'd be looking at the CPU upgrade first because the SSD and RAM won't solve the bottlenecking.

[T-Bag]

CPU is old in gaming terms. 7700 series cards are about 1/4 of the performance of a new mid-range GPU. 4GB of ram isn't bad, and 64bit Win 7 is fine.

Basically he's heading towards upgrade territory. An SSD might buy some loading time improvements, but he's going to find himself increasingly struggling with performance.

[Tutonic]

I concur - that CPU is getting a bit long in the tooth, which sadly usually means a costly upgrade and you'll probably need a new motherboard as well

[King]

Thanks guys that helped i will look around for a new cpu.

Greetz king

[King]

i found this Intel Pentium Core 2 Duo E8400 3.00Ghz Socket 775 for â,¬70,
and i will put in 4 gig extra memory.
Hope that will help.

greetz king

[lionheart]

It won't help very much TBH, you really need a quad core cpu for BF4. This is about the best you can get for that System board, but then you have to ask whether you are throwing good money after bad.

[King]

Thanks guys.

But if i do these changes can i play BF4 better, than i can save some monney better to upgrade later.
I have to do something now but don't want to spent a whole lot of money.

[TeaLeaf]

I concur - that CPU is getting a bit long in the tooth, which sadly usually means a costly upgrade and you'll probably need a new motherboard as well

Tut summarised it pretty well.   A new Haswell chip means a new motherboard as well, so spending money on upgrading anything else will not really give you the improvements you want given that the CPU is the main thing holding you back.

[T-Bag]

Thanks guys.

But if i do these changes can i play BF4 better, than i can save some monney better to upgrade later.
I have to do something now but don't want to spent a whole lot of money.

That's â,¬70 going to waste essentially. The upgrade will be several hundred, I wouldn't start by spending 20-25% of what a proper CPU upgrade on something that is already obsolete, and likely won't improve performance too much. The most cost effective "small" upgrade is to save for CPU+Mobo+Ram, the performance increase will be reasonable, but still hang on the GPU which can be upgraded as and when funds replenish.

In the mean time I'd see if you can overclock your current CPU for a little extra short term performance.