I was going to blog about that someday soon. My stinky Pentium D 2.8 isn't able to keep up, I think. Things did improve quite a bit, especially with GPU intensive games like Crysis. Before, I was playing 1280x1024, everything on high, no AA at approximately 10-15 frames per second, but now I'm playing 1280x1024, everything on high, 4X AA at approximately 20-30 frames per second. And I don't know about the performance on Team Fortress 2 before, but I know things got a bit choppy at times when I had everything maxed out with 2X AA, but now I can max everything (including AA), and I get somewhere between 30-40 frames per second. But I still can't max out Neverwinter Nights 2 without it becoming choppy in outdoor areas (while looking like crap at that!), and framerates drop to the teens in Team Fortress 2 when I try to record video clips. So I'd like to upgrade my motherboard and CPU soon as well. Maybe I can get your help on that. :D And I might have to get a new monitor as well; my stupid 17" won't let me play at anything higher than 1280x1024 (I tried a bunch of things, but it just won't let me, that stupid thing).
augustlight
Hah, and here you were saying you wanted to wait a while before upgrading the mobo and processor. I knew you'd feel the urge to do it sooner rather than later as soon as you saw the performance increases of having a better video card. Anyway, yeah, I knew the Pentium D would hold you back, but I recommended the 4850 anyway because I knew that would give you the biggest performance improvement overall, and it's generally best when you're upgrading a little at a time to go for whatever will give the best increase first. Anyway, glad it gave you some noticeable increases. The slow-down while recording is undoubtedly due to the processor, as things like FRAPS task the CPU primarily.
As for the processor, I would recommend the E8500 the most right now at $190.
And I might get another 4850 (since it's so pretty!) and crossfire the two along with the motherboard and CPU upgrade. But I probably won't upgrade for another 2 or 3 months.
augustlight
If you're willing to wait that long (and spend that much money), then you might want to see what Intel's high-end Nehalem's coming out at the end of the year turn out like. The cheapest one is supposed to be for $284, so depending on how it performs, you may want to get that. Only thing is that the new motherboards that will come out for them (the Nehalems have a new LGA 1366 socket) will only be compatible with DDR3 memory, I think (which means you'd have to upgrade your RAM, too, and DDR3 is expensive). So I don't know, it depends on how much you want to spend. I, myself, am going to wait until the Nehalem 32nm die shrunken Westmeres and Clarkdales come out in the first half of 2010 before I upgrade my processor and motherboard.
If you do choose to get a C2D and not Nehalem, I'd highly recommend getting an X38 (or X48, doesn't really matter) chipset motherboard if you're wanting to do Crossfire. The older P35 and P45 chipsets don't run both PCI-E X16 slots in X16 bandwidth when you're running in Crossfire, which can limit performance of the cards.
Oh, and by the way, I bought a GTX 260 a little while ago. 8) It was on sale for only $230 with The Witcher for free. It's scheduled to arrive tomorrow; I can't wait to see how it performs. :D Hopefully I can get my Secret of Monkey Island review done by tomorrow, then I can blog about that and my two game impressions and my new video card.
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