Need a little advice on what to upgrade for my gaming rig

[Demonsoul]

I built my system over a year ago and was limited to a budget but the result was fantastic for my purposes at the time. I know that this isn't the best system in the world but I am trying to figure out what I should focus on upgrading first... I have had some FPS issues in new games like GW2, Planetside 2 and even Firefall. I'll post the CPU-Z image of certain components and please tell me what you think needs help.

I do have concerns about the RAM. It came out of a prebuilt HP PC and not something I bought new. I doubt that 8GB of DDR 3 is too little but it it maybe just low performance RAM? If this is possibly the issue what should I be looking at for replacement?

Quadcore i7 860... wouldn't imagine this being an issue but let me know what you think!

^ My motherboard.

This was my first suspect however everything I have been able to find about my card is telling me that the card isn't outdated and should perform well.
Anyway I thank anyone who can offer advise in advance! If you need more information about my rig or anything else feel free to ask and I'll respond ASAP. I haven't been reading up on components or really keeping up on that sort of stuff for some time so it puts me at a disadvantage when I try to research upgrades.

 

[oldikes]

Ram is standard speed pretty much...CPU should be fine...I honestly dont know. Planetside 2 requires quite a PC as far as I have played...might be your graphics card at this point although its honestly not awful..CPU shouldnt be a bottleneck, as far as I know.

 

[Demonsoul]

Ram is standard speed pretty much...CPU should be fine...I honestly dont know. Planetside 2 requires quite a PC as far as I have played...might be your graphics card at this point although its honestly not awful..CPU shouldnt be a bottleneck, as far as I know.

OK, thanks for the response! Maybe I should look into adding another 5870... I've been comparing cards on http://www.hwcompare.com/ and if this site is accurate at all then I would need to go way up past what I was hoping to spend just to get a significant upgrade x.x. I would LOVE a gtx 690 tho!

 

[oldikes]

I would NOT recommend using hw compare. They do not test cards in any way they just take numbers and throw them on a chart not taking into account architectures and the like. Can anyone else confirm if its normal for a 5870 to run at 400MHz? or is that just at idle? O.o

But seriously HW compare says that a 5970 is better than a 7970. which simply isnt true.
To run planetside 2, which is a pretty CPU heavy game (I know, tried it on my laptop, almost died) your CPU should be fine, and 8GB of ram is plenty. Perhaps it is your video card...but I don't know, I would wait for others to confirm this

 

[slh28]

Try overclocking your CPU, those games are quite CPU heavy. It looks like you're running at the default clocks (with a very high voltage for that speed) so you should be able to get a 1Ghz bump with a cheap aftermarket cooler.

 

[LinkedKube]

Seems you have enough ram. You must have your power setting configured to "balanced," or "power saver" in windows control panel. Its making your cpu throttle down. That's not a bad thing. but I would definately suggest a bit of overclocking on the cpu. You also need to consider the resolution you'll be gaming at.

 

[Demonsoul]

Ok all good advise I will certainly look into clocking the cpu and getting a cooler for it before I buy anything.

Seems you have enough ram. You must have your power setting configured to "balanced," or "power saver" in windows control panel. Its making your cpu throttle down. That's not a bad thing. but I would definately suggest a bit of overclocking on the cpu. You also need to consider the resolution you'll be gaming at.

You are correct on that. Also wasn't running anything other that firefox when I took the SS. Maybe should have had something going to give better numbers? I don't know I'm kinda out of the loop with this stuff now... been a while since I have done any building or upgrades.