955 upgrade choices? Oh noes, another thread like this?

Aaanyway, I'll get onto it quickly:

I have a phenom 955 BE, which is quite old, and apparently is a little bit behind in... stuff. (We played around with some 3d model benchmark app, which tested physics and graphics, my graphics being fine, but physics (powered by cpu) was quite low)

So, the question:
Is the 955BE decent enough for nowadays gaming (I plan to get into some intense games (like crysis, witcher 2, guild wars 2, etc). Or should I upgrade to a newer amd cpu if I can? My motherboard is an am3+ socket motherboard (GA-970a-d3)
OR, should I invest in a brand new motherboard to suit an intel chip, and get an intel cpu? I was told most games are optimised for intel chips, and also that intel chips run a lot better as well, etc etc. This was about 5 minutes before I played a game they claimed to be optimised for intel on my computer, and ran it on ultra easily >.>

But yeah, opinions?
Also, if anyone remembers my last thread/ is curious about that... The ram was well fucked. Did memtest86+ and got 3971 errors on the ram... It's been sent back to the store for a checkup. Should hopefully be getting some new ram in the mail eventually)

If the 955 is decent enough, I'll just keep that, and keep saving for my car to get that thing up and running and dose'ing like a beast.


Cheers, and thanks to anyone who answers :D
Also, sorry if this thread has happened 52 times before. As some of you probably know by now, I suck at search... Can never find anything D:

1.Are you looking to overclock?
2.Do you have any preference? (AMD or Intel)
3.Do you have a budget?
Sorry for asking questions :(

As someone who has owned a 955BE I can say that it is still a decent cpu. I really didn't see a huge performance jump going from the 955BE to the 2600k. As for upgrading there really is no need to unless you do a lot of multitasking or plan on streaming. I gave my cousin my 955 and he has no problems playing any game which includes BF3, WOW, LOL, blacklight retribution, and planetside 2, there's probably other games to list but I don't know them. Of course most game are gpu dependent anyway so even if you have a weaker cpu you can still play them just fine with a badass gpu.

Ah, awesome :D
That's good to hear/ read.
thanks for that. I may just keep this, and attempt to overclock it at some stage, perhaps



As for the above, probably. I don't really know how to, but I would overclock this, if I knew what to do, without setting it on fire >.>
Preference: Probably amd, cause it's cheap, and I'm cheap :>
Budget: Nada. I usually just save up to it, if I can.
Only problem with intel, is it'll be quite a lot of money to change motherboard and cpu. Amd cpu swap would be a lot less, and keeping current one, and overclocking it would be even cheaper again. hah

S'all good, questions are good. I probably should have put a budget up there >.>

I found over clocking wasn't that bad but I only went to about 4ghz with minimal increases to voltage and the likes. If you plan on OC'ing I would recommend an aftermarket cooler, if you don't have one already, since the 955 is a somewhat hot cpu.

Yeah, I've got a xigmatek red scorpion iirc

Just has a different 120mm fan on it currently. A non pwm fan, which seems to work well enough. The bastard is actually HUGE. Had to take off my side 210mm fan to fit it. >.>

But, cool. I'll have a play, and see how I go :D

Hm..Will you be playing Crysis like this?

That would be cool, but doubtful

Then your CPU is fine. Maybe next year you should change it.

Yeah, fair enough. Cheers for that

I'm not even sure if my computer can play crysis like that, and honestly I wouldn't really want to. Playing crysis like that is probably reserved to the people who have multi gpu rigs with the i7 6 core cpu.

955 is more than enough for today, but anything faster than say a 7950 will probably be bottlenecked by it if you don't overclock that sucker to 4 ghz.

Stick with your 955, if you wanna upgrade then I would wait for either Intel to release 14nm processors, or for AMD to release Steamroller (both will probably happen next year) so you can keep using the same motherboard.