Hello.
I was wondering if someone could help me.
My PC spec is:
Gtx 680 Phantom 2Gb
AMD Phantom II X4 955 @ 3,66 GHz
4Gb 1333 Memory
WD Green 1Tb HDD
I was wondering how big bottleneck I get from from the CPU and HDD, and how much I will gain if I switched to i7-3930k and 16Gb fo memory?
Whats your mobo? That has more to do with bottlenecking than CPU and HDD. If you upgrade to an SSD you'd get noticable improvements. Most things dont need more than 8GB, so if you upgrade that, upgrade it to the highest speed your board can take, Your CPU is fine but dropping the cash to an the i7 would also make another huge improvement. After doing all that upgrading, you should see about a 20-35 FPS increase. Make sure you use adaptive v-sync so you dont get screen tearing too.
The biggest bottleneck in any system is always the hard drive. I would recommend getting a core i5 and an SSD. You don't really need 16GB of ram. I'd recommend 8GB, but 4GB is still fine for right now if you don't want to spend the money.
first I would buy this heatsink, and overclock your CPU to 4Ghz try to overclock your ram while you're at it, try 217*18.5 1.4-1.45v and 1 bump of voltage to ram i.e if 1.5v then 1.65
once you have more money get this ram set 240*17 lower the ram multi to 6.67 (1333) set its timings and voltage, lower the HT multi by 1, increase CPU-NB voltage by 0.1v
once you have more money get this CPU and Mobo combo, overclock it to 4.2Ghz and there will be no game that it can't handle or bottleneck
and like vortex said get a nice SSD this one has really high IOPs for the price, it performs better than thier HyperX series