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I was given an HP xw4600 workstation. It has an E8600 and 8GB of ram. I just ordered a gtx 560ti and a new PSU. What kind of performance should I expect compare to new hardware today? I will be playing BF3 mostly. It should be fine I would think.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/battlefield-3-graphics-performance,3063-13.html

It's perfectly capable in most today's games, you should't have many problems running them

I used to have an C2D pentium at 3.8Ghz, and it was good for most games but suffered badly in Bad Company 2 and doesn't hold up well in BF3. GPUz showed it bottle-necked my 5850, and in my experience BF3 really needs 4 threads in order to run smooth (quad core or i3).

Anandtech.com has a handy benchmark comparison tool that will answer all your questions (although not specifically for BF3). I've queued up an i5-2500K for comparison which is really at the optimal price/performance for enthusiast gaming machines. Going for an i7 is really only necessary for power users with a specific focus that requires 8 threads or people with deep pockets that can't figure out where else to spend their money. The good thing is that BF3 is more of a GPU limited game, whereas games that reviewers use to compare processor gaming performance are always CPU limited for obvious reasons, they show the largest FPS delta between different processors. TR also did an article regarding BF3 performance of a few GPUs of which your 560Ti is one of them....it's worth a read.

I'll second the advice to go and read TR's article on BF3 performance. The CPU you have is unlikely to change the results by much....

Good to Know that I shouldn't expect a CPU hit. Thanks