CPU upgrade on old PC

Was wondering if it is worth upgrading the cpu from an old Athlon 64 x 2 5000+ to a Phenom x3. It's an old PC with a hd 7770 and 8gb ddr 2 memory, that my sister uses for playing Sims 3. She got into pc gaming recently and with the steam sales it's been able to run sleeping dogs fairly well but games like asassins creed 3 and bioshock infinite are so laggy she ends up hogging my i5 3570k gtx 660ti machine.

I done some reseach and it seems the best compatible CPU I can put in it is a triple core phenom (possibly a phenom x4 but there might be issues with AM2+ backwards compatilibty/BIOS) and I can get em for £30 off ebay. Would I see any real improvement? I know for sure that this old Athlon is bottlenecking the 7770. Is it worth spending the £30 or should I just build her a new PC around an i3 3220 or something like that?

Sweet. Could you give me some examples of what kind of games you saw the improvement on?

Sweet. Could you give me some examples of what kind of games you saw the improvement on?

elegance89

If you can buy a phenom II x4, a lot of games use 4 threads and that phenom x3 doesn't have hyperthreading (not that it would do that much good anyway)

the phenom II x4 965 is dirt cheap right now , like 90$

You can buy a new pc too all depends on your budget and what cpu's your motherboard support. What is the type of motherboard?

An 8850 or 8750 would be worth the 45 bucks. I would do it and see if that doesn't get you there for now. That Athlon is pretty tired.

Try and get a quad core Phenom II if possible

Sweet. Could you give me some examples of what kind of games you saw the improvement on?

elegance89

Was wondering if it is worth upgrading the cpu from an old Athlon 64 x 2 5000+ to a Phenom x3. It's an old PC with a hd 7770 and 8gb ddr 2 memory, that my sister uses for playing Sims 3. She got into pc gaming recently and with the steam sales it's been able to run sleeping dogs fairly well but games like asassins creed 3 and bioshock infinite are so laggy she ends up hogging my i5 3570k gtx 660ti machine.

I done some reseach and it seems the best compatible CPU I can put in it is a triple core phenom (possibly a phenom x4 but there might be issues with AM2+ backwards compatilibty/BIOS) and I can get em for £30 off ebay. Would I see any real improvement? I know for sure that this old Athlon is bottlenecking the 7770. Is it worth spending the £30 or should I just build her a new PC around an i3 3220 or something like that?

elegance89

Thanks guys. I got a Phenom x4 9500 for just £25 from ebay and it has indeed made all the games I needed it to run great. Saves me the hassle of building my sis a new rig for at least 12 months.