Windows 7: Hardware Mistake?

Someone please tell me I didn't make a hardware error that I'll soon regret. I built a PC for mid-high level gaming. Here's the specs

i5 661 8G RAm
Intel DP55KG motherboard
1 TB Hard drive
Galaxy GTX 470 graphics card.

After reading more and more reviews, it looks like my processor is not cut out for mid-high end gaming. I played Battlefield Bad Company 2 last night on High specs and it ran fine, but is this system going to be "bottlenecked" at the processor?

Should I pay the restocking fees to upgrade the mobo and processor?

That's difficult to answer since you can already play Bad Company on high settings and do not seem to suffer any of the cpu problems so many have with that game. Having said that, if it's not too late and not too much hassle, then yeah, I would get a quad-core; only because games are now using more cores and also because games don't use hyper-threading... that feature being useless to the gamer.

However, at least as it pertains to Bad Company in its current state, upgrading to the very best hardware money can buy does not guarantee performance. For some reason, guys with the baddest hardware may suffer from R7 just like guys still running Athlons... it's all very random as to who gets jacked and who doesn't.

Thanks for the response. Well, I've already installed windows and thrown away the packaging. I wonder if Best Buy Online would still take it back...

Hi King J,

Have a look at this before making any rash decisions. I think you might be experiencing some of the symptoms In all seriousness, that is a powerful rig that will not dissapoint, as you have seen in Bad Company 2. I'm running a Quad Core i7 but it's not really helping my Radeon HD 4850 perform any better on BFBC2. I only get about 30 fps on medium settings in 1920x1080.

But that's just my two cents

Cheers,

Walker
Windows Outreach Team

@ WalkerA,

Your 4850 is a great card, but at that resolution, something like a 4870 or 4890 would be a better choice.

@ King J,

Go for what your wallet says, and don't get caught up in what Johnny is doing with his super overclocked ultra chilled sytem, yet only getting 5 more FPS that you are with your current system.

Synthetic benchmarks is one thing, real word application is something different, and the one the real world goes by

It's alway nice to have a kickass system, but money talks. There's nothing wrong with your system as is.

FYI - Intel Core i5 661 Review - Overclockers Club

My $0.04 worth: run what have. If, in the near future, you want to upgrade your performance, rather than spend mucho dinero on a new CPU/mobo, for $350 get a second GTX 470 and create a SLI array at which you just might marvel. If you don't mind tweaking, you could consider OCing your CPU for a modest gain; Google will point you to many excellent articles on that.

Monk

... just like to add a few more thoughts. I just got done playing BC2 all night with the new i5 and the new monitor.

I thought my old core was pretty good, an E8400 @ 4GHz, but, my god... this i5 evaporated all the R7 performance issues I had, even at an increased res of 1920x1080.

If you're a Battlefield player, then I'd highly suggest you go for the quad. As I understand things, DICE is also using the Frostbyte engine for BF3, so, BC2 is fair warning that if you want good play for BF3, the more cores the better.

for bad company yes , it was a bit of a mistake , you can get a 40% fps increase with a 2.4 gig i7 at stock speeds , its not a bad cpu though and has been clocked to 4.2 gig on air!

Bad company is a terrible game , performance wise , its very heavily dependant on a fast high clocked cpu due mainly to the badly coded physics engine they ported from console land.

you can check , set your graphics ingame at medium no AA and no AF , record your FPS , then up the settings to max with 4aa and 16af , if you see no noticible change in fps the theres a cpu bottleneck right there...........but i think if you oc that cpu you will see an improvement.

you would have been better off with a quad core but only for BC2 all your other games should be ok

I don't know, as you said, some games perform better that others on the same equipment. So I tend to look at overall performance in a number of apps/games as opposed to just a single app/game.

From that perspective, I think the jury is still out. I would wait and what the overall system performance is before making final judgement.

My two cents