Hey everyone, I'm looking to upgrade my processor since I'm still running a pentium 4 and I believe its my worst bottleneck. I use my computer for casual gaming and I play my games at a resolution of 1280*1024 with some filters. I would like to know if a Pentium Dual Core clocked at 2.7 (300*9 multi since I can only choose FSB values of 200-300 in my bios) would be enough for my video card. In the country I live in the Pentium Dual core e2160 is priced at 84$ while the better performing core2duo e4500 is priced at 150$. Since I'm on a very tight budget I would like to know if the pentium Dual Core is more than enough for my current setup (check my specs) or If I really should go for the core2duo for the extra performance. Thanks for any replies.



(P.S At the moment I'm able to play Bioshock with 34-60 frames per second. would the processor upgrade improve my fps?)

The E2160 would be quite okay, and can be OCed quite nicely as well. The E4500 will be noticeably faster from the get-go though, so it solely rests upon whether or not you are willing to OC. Also, if you're looking to play very demanding games like Crysis and BioShock regularly, get the E4500 instead.

For some reason I have a FSB cap of 300, so that is the limit to which I can overclock the components. I also cannot modify the cpu voltage from within the bios which limits my overclocks even more. With that said, If I get lucky, I can get the E2160 to 2.7 ghz and hopefully the e4500 to 3.0ghz. I might be getting the E2160 since I heard it can be overclocked to quite acceptable levels without increasing the voltage...

Are you sure that your RAM will handle that kind of an overclock?

My ram is 667 mhz, 667/2= 333, the processors have a FSB of 800, 800/4=200
so theoretically I should have 133 mhz of space to overclock. Why wouldn't it handle the overclock?

I just found out I have to do the bsel mod to overclock decently on my mobo

I'm not attempting to say you're wrong or insult your intelligence nor am I saying that you don't currently have headroom, I'm simply making sure that you have everything worked out properly.

To answer your initial question, your FPS should increase at least a bit because you'll have more processing capacity to handle the threads dedicated to the Windows environment etc.

sorry I posted a reply twice, Zenosincks, there was some problem with my internet, thanks for the reply