Should I upgrade my cpu for BF3?

[biggyk]

whats the best program to monitor cpu? I can then post a log anyways.

[biggyk]

So I ran a few tests with furmark and 3dmark. I oc my gtx460 a little which did improve the overall score however, playing/testing a few games I didnt see my fps change all that much. So I am assuming that its my cpu that bottle necking.

[Freefall]

I don't think that is neccessarily what is happening. An average overclock might boost your average frame rate by 3-10 fps so don't expect the world.

[Killswitch]

I agree with Freefall. Almost every video card I've owned didn't gain much in real world gaming when overclocked. At least not enough to make a major difference, although some games you'd gain more then others of course. YMMV. As for benchmarking though, most definitely worth while for seeing if you can beat your buddies score! haha

I doubt your Athlon II x3 @ 3GHz would bottleneck a single GTX460 in any circumstance. A good way to check is to lower the resolution waaaaay down and see if the FPS increase. If it stays the same or doesn't go up by very much you've got a cpu bottle neck.

[Bond007]

Most games I would say it isn't going to be a large cpu bottleneck, but BF seems to be well threaded and use CPU well. That said the only good info on CPU scaling so far is for BF BC2. Here is a chart I found and let you draw your own conclusions if it would be worth it to upgrade for BF3...IMO probably would help out.



Only amd processors worth considering for you would be x4 955 or x6 1090 IMO (probably x6, but this review didn't include and x6 for comparison). BF BC2 seems to like L3 cache and cores. 955 and 1090 are cheapest black edition x4 and x6 so could be OC to speed of higher models if you want it.