Upgrade my PC for gaming

[huaihuteng]

Hi:
I want to upgrade my computer for gaming recently. I bought a GTX 660Ti video card 3 months ago and found it was still hard to meet my expectations on ultra settings when playing Battlefield 3. Then I realized my CPU (AMD Phenom II X 4 945 ~ 3.0GHz) might be the bottleneck. Now, I have a $500 budget to upgrade, since I don't know much about computers, can anyone give me some suggestions on what to buy? This computer was bought in 2010, and it was HPE-400y. 64 bit system. The memory is 8GB, Foxconn 2AB1 motherboard. Do I need to buy a new motherboard to fit my new CPU? Any suggestions?
Thanks!

 

[Yevrag35]

Did you ever upgrade your power supply? Cause if not, your stock 300watt is severely underpowering the 660ti.

 

[huaihuteng]

Thanks for the reply. Yes, I did upgrade my power supply before installing the 660Ti, and I think my current supply is750W, is it enough? and any suggestions on what I should buy?

 

[Yevrag35]

Thanks for the reply. Yes, I did upgrade my power supply before installing the 660Ti, and I think my current supply is750W, is it enough? and any suggestions on what I should buy?

You should be able to hit 60fps at 1080p with that equipment.
What are the performance issues you're seeing?

 

[Reckless]

Here are a few way you can maximize your budget.

First you would want to re-insert the Radeon 5450 included and the 300 watt power supply.
You may want to order a 250GB HDD and replace it with the 1TB and sell the tower. You should easily make 100 to 150$ to add to your budget.

Once you have done that, you will need to decide if you want to go Intel or AMD.
Make sure you have an appropriate Mid or Full ATX Case and 16GB of RAM. Once you have chosen these three options we can assist you in budgeting the rest.

 

[huaihuteng]

im using 1920X1080 at medium settings... when I got into a battle (many players around) it drops to 30fps. my friend has the same video card as mine, hes playing at ultra and its rare to see him playing under 60fps. So, I think my CPU or motherboard is bottlenecking the performance.

 

[PP Mguire]

Nothing is bottlenecking your performace in the least. Make sure nothing is running in the background, kill background processes that are taking up a lot of resources, make sure all drivers are updated and make sure there are NO AMD/ATI graphics drivers present on your machine.

If you are still running the initial install of Windows that came on your PC then you need to do a fresh install of Windows. A fresh install of Windows will guarantee that there are no driver conflicts degrading performance.