Beej wrote@ Ysamoka: Bottleneck is overrated, yes a quad core is better but not "needed". I am the best example of true bottleneck, runninga 460 @ 812mhz (almost same as the chosen 560) with a dual core e5400. Now thats bottlneck! Yes he will not have the full performance of his gpu, but he will lose what? 4-5 fps? And if a game utelizes 4 cores, his 2 fast cores will be enough to give him a smooth experience, instead of getting 100fps he gets 60-70 (still amazing), and am shooting very high numbers here.
4-5FPS? Are you kidding me? There are cases of 70% bottleneck! And also, don't forget that games that favor quad cores such as Battlefield do not just use the 4 cores because 2 cores processing power is not enough, but simply because they can spread their load and achieve better parallelization. They don't max out cores @ 100% like Unreal Tournament 3 does, for example. And about bottleneck too: I have tried previously to run a GTX 260 on a Pentium 4 while I was waiting for the rest of my rig, I used to get 18 - 20FPS in Unreal Tournament 3. Now I get MINIMUM 70-90 and usually 100-110FPS. Crysis, at High / Very High, 1024x768, ran 15-20FPS AVG sometimes touching 30 in forests or 60 indoors (I'm not even sure of that). So not all bottlenecks will lose you 4-5FPS. GTA IV on a dual core? Don't even think about it (and that uses a triple core). Third, I'm sure you've checked your GPU usage while running on a dual core. It can barely crank 50%-60% GPU usage. So essentially you have wasted processing power. If so, I recommend he scales down to a GTX550Ti or a GTS 450 IF and ONLY if price difference is substantial. Had he been overclocking his duallie Core i3 (which is on SB impossible), then it would have been good. But considering people ran GTX 260's and preferred Quad Cores at the time (we're talking about people running GTX 260 over Core 2 Duo @ 4.5GHz), this is a GTX 560Ti we're talking about, in a world where most games can now benefit from quads. And if not now, then very soon. BFBC2 can already use 16 cores. Metro 2033 stresses out 4-6 cores.
And about the PSU, well you're perfectly right. Consider such a system draws 350W TOPS, 350W / 450W = 77% which is great. But since the majority of available 450W PSUs tend to be cheap knockoffs, he'll have to be careful. If we were talking about Corsair 450W PSUs, then there's no problem. But even Thermaltake, I have my reservations about it. For a bit of breathing room, 500 - 550W is great. That way he'll be at 65-70% load of PSU, which makes it last longer. But it's not upgradeable except if replacing the Core i3 with an i5 or the graphics card with a similar mid-range model (GTX 660Ti, for example, when that becomes available, and if at same power draw). But then again at budget, upgrades aren't too feasible. Even at mid-range / high-end sometimes upgrades aren't feasible. Look what Intel did to LGA1366 and LGA1156.
@RAM: 2 x 2GB is only $7 more expensive than 1 x 4GB, and nets him double channel, and really helps if he runs out of VRAM and has to resort to system RAM. Now he has to decide whether he's going for 8GB eventually (get 1 x4GB now) or wants to stick to 4GB (get 2x2GB and be done with it).
