F1rst p0st!

Anyway, I woke up one day and suddenly I had an HD4850 in my computer. The problem is, I've only got a stock E6300 in there keeping it company. I'm thinking of upgrading to an E8400, so my question to you is thus: Will I see any noticeable performance gain in games by grabbing a faster CPU? I got the 4850 after owning an nVidia 7300GT, and the increase in performance was mindboggling. I know that my E6300 isn't letting it run to it's full capacity, but if I'm only going to see a few extra frames per second, I couldn't justify the purchase of a new processor as well. In such a case, I'd be better off overclocking the chip I've already got.

3DMark06 score of 8096! Eek! Not as high as I hoped!

Advice is appreciated!

If your feeling adventureous, you can always OC your E6300 to 3.0GHz+, presuming the remainder of the hardware supports that. With a low multiplier the E6300 needs a motherboard capable of a rather high FSB to get to 3.0. And of course you'll need the ram that can handle those speeds as well. The E8400 does have more cache, which does improve the performance of some things, and you wouldn't have to OC the snot out of it - unless you really wanted too.