Worth it for me to switch to Windows 7?
 

Hi All,

I am looking for some advice, I have a Q6600 quad running at the stock 2.4 with an Asus GTX280 oc (1gig) using the maximum 3.25 gigs of ram (ddr2) that windows XP allows. Currently I have trouble getting acceptible frame rates with even less than medium graphics settings. My question is could I expect enough of an increase in performance to make it worth while to go to Windows 7 and install a fresh 8 gigs of ddr2 ram, or would I be better off saving the cash to put into a new system (I don't plan to build new until next fall).

Has anyone with a similar system made the OS upgrade to play this game, and if so would you do it again?

Please forgive me if this has been asked before, I did look through the forum but couldn't find the answers I needed.

Thanks,
Jay

Best upgrade I made in the last year was switching to a SSD

When i swithced from XP to WIN7 i got a reasonably large performance boost. On XP i could only use low settings and now i can use some high and some medium. My PC is similar to yours, Core 2 duo O/C to 3.3, gtx 275, 4MB RAM. So i would say yes its definatly worth the upgrade.

The best upgrades you could make to get il2 (and any other modern game to run very well) would be to get a much faster graphics card and more ram. Unfortunately, windows xp generally does not support over 3gb (aside from the 64 bit version) so you should upgrade that too, but I cant see it being worth upgrading the processor for another year or two. Buy a better cooler and push its clock speed up a few hundred megahertz to something around or over 3.2 and you should have a pretty good system. COD is much more graphics and particularly VRam intensive, than CPU intensive (the devs have not even gotten to the point of fully taking advantage of quad cores, which you happen to have, so the CPU is just not being loaded down that much. If you have nothing running in the background 3gb should also be just enough as xp uses a minimal amount of ram (though it does not allocate it as efficiently). Something like an nvidia gtx570, (or if you really want perfect frame rates, a 580 3gb) or an ati hd6970 2gb should give you more bang for your buck than almost anything else. That should be followed by 6+ gb of ram and Windows 7. Upgrading the CPU in two years or a year and a half should be an easy enough job at that point if you still feel you want to that you needn't worry about it. Either way it will end up costing less than a pre built system if that is something you are considering.

S!

Agreeing with Ace here. SSD has been my best upgrade in a long time. Add to this Windows 7 64-bit and I have been pretty happy with my rig.

Thanks for the advice guys, I still need to give it a bit more thought but after reading your replies I think what i will do is pick up a boxed version of Win7 so that I can still use it in a new rig down the road and try that on it's own first with a mild OC on my Q6600, I have read that I should be able to safely push 2.8 with good fan cooling. If I'm still not happy I might look at getting a newer video card.

S!