You have a processor that's at least 5 years old and a video card that's at least 4 years old.

Theoretically, a better video card will give you better framerates and visuals. Unfortunately, your Pentium D processor is a bottleneck. Granted it is a dual core chip, it is only slightly better than the Pentium 4 chips that came before it. Its L2 cache of 1MB could only do so much for a game like HotS.

After a decent video card upgrade (say GT4xx series), I say you'd be lucky to get 30FPS at mid settings in the first 6 to 10 minutes of a multiplayer game. Then you'd be on the losing end of a late game 200/200 battle.

The best you could go is the 3 year old Core 2 Quad processor. I doubt you'd be able to find this or any of the compatible processors for the LGA 775 chipset nowadays. Just save up for a new desktop, you'd be wasting your time and money for 3 year old parts that are still not up to par with what is currently being offered in the market today. There are decent i5 packages, just take a walk around Lowyat or Digimall.

Seriously, why?

First look, I can barely tell the difference between Ultra and Extreme. But reading through other threads, I found out that the ONLY difference between Ultra and Extreme is Ambient Occlusion (aka, refined shadows). This effect reduces your FPS by 30%.

But to seriously answer your question, you have a 2-year old processor with a 3 year old video card. With a decent amount of RAM and a good cooling system, you might be able to get 60FPS on Ultra. Then, if you go up to Extreme, factoring in the 30% FPS hit brought by the Ambient Occlusion, you're left with 42FPS. Not much room to work with when you get to 200/200 battles. Running two GTX580 cards on SLI would give you more than 80% performance increase (almost 100% in some cases). But, of course, you have to have 2 GTX580 cards and a compatible motherboard.

This test was done in November 2010, when WoL was only 4 months old. Not really a reliable benchmark for HotS performance.

Also, after looking at the chart that Quazacolt linked to, I was actually quite generous with my 60FPS estimate on your AMD FX-4100 Quad-Core + 580 GT + 4GB RAM rig. The GTX680 + i7-2600M + 8GB RAM managed 75FPS on 1920x1080 Ultra/Extreme with AA on. And that's on the campaign! I reckon this rig will be lucky to get 65FPS on a 200/200 multiplayer game.

Anyways, to each his own. My opinion though is that, multiplayer FPS shouldn't go below 60FPS on your monitor's maximum resolution REGARDLESS of graphics quality. Any lag or performance spike, you're screwed, most especially on 200/200 battles.

I personally run HotS on mid/high I think, 60FPS locked in the variables.txt file. I'll post my exact settings when I get home.

Here, let me Google that for you.

So I have just gotten home. As promised, here are my graphics settings:

Actually, what VSync (short for Vertical Sync) does is to force the video card to synchronize the video card output to the maximum refresh rate of the display.

You would want VSync turned on if you don't want to see any video tearing. This also means that FPS is fixed to the maximum refresh rate of your monitor. Modern monitors have it at 75 to 85Hz. Some even go 120Hz. This is a double-edged sword actually. The video card works hard to constantly throw out 75Hz (or 75FPS): no more, no less. If there are a lot of stuff on screen, your video may actually stutter, which happens if the video card fails to render all the polygons at that rate. But if you have a very good rig, then go ahead and turn it on.

On my laptop, my display has maximum refresh rate of 120Hz, so if I have the VSync turned on, my video card will work very very hard to output 120 frames per second. And I don't want to burn out my video card so I leave it turned off.

Having VSync turned off allows the video card to output virtually infinite FPS rate. But at the cost of video tearing, of course.

So why do I cap my framerate to 60FPS? Let me give you some history. Back in the WoL Beta and a few weeks into WoL release, there was a bug that burned out many video cards. The players notice that during idle scenes (even while in the menu), the WoL engine pushed the video cards to render over 1000FPS. While the video cards can theoretically render 1000FPS, they failed because the video cards generated so much heat that they burned. Blizzard of course "investigated" the issue, but never pushed a patch to fix it. But the community figured out that by adding a couple of lines to the variables.txt file, they could cap the FPS rate preventing video card burn outs.

If I had a desktop, no problem, I could simply replace the video card if it burns out. But since I have a laptop, the video card is soldered onto the motherboard and is irreplaceable. Just me taking care of something that I cannot do without.

If you guys also have Diablo 3, go to the Options menu, you will see check boxes for "Max Foreground FPS" and "Max Background FPS". This does the same thing as the 2 extra lines I added into may SC2's variable.txt file.

Again, please note that capping FPS is not the same as turning on VSync. To summarize, capping FPS to 60 allows the video card to work within/between 0FPS and 60FPS, while VSync forces the video card to render at the maximum refresh rate of your display, no more, no less, which generally leads to poor performance.

Go ahead test VSync on and off. See what works best for you.

I suggest you get the trial so you know how the game would run on the current patch. Play a game vs AI then go 200/200 so you'd know how your computer performs and then you'll be able to decide better whether or not to get the original.

I don't know if you were able to read my previous posts, but here it is:

With the same motherboard, I doubt you will be able to find a compatible processor because the Intel's Socket LGA 775 (aka Socket T) has long been obsolete.

You'll be better off buying a new computer.

It seems that Lelong has a few listings:

http://www.lelong.com.my/intel-core-2-quad...7-01-Sale-I.htm - RM 1315

http://www.lelong.com.my/intel-core-2-quad...7-01-Sale-I.htm - RM 1200

http://www.lelong.com.my/intel-core-2-duo-...7-01-Sale-I.htm - RM 775

http://www.lelong.com.my/intel-core-2-quad...7-01-Sale-I.htm - RM 580

http://www.lelong.com.my/intel-core-2-duo-...7-01-Sale-I.htm - RM 455

http://www.lelong.com.my/intel-core-2-duo-...7-01-Sale-I.htm - RM 388

http://www.lelong.com.my/intel-core-2-duo-...7-01-Sale-I.htm - RM 375

I'd go with the Q8400 over the E8600, but either of them looks decent for their price.

If you're gonna get a new computer, I suggest a decent Ivy Bridge i5 quad core, with at least a GTX-5xx series video card and 8GB DDR3 RAM. Ask around at Digimall or Lowyat, they could put together a decent package for you depending on your budget.

Not likely. Because:

1. 4GB RAM may not be enough; and

2. I still feel that your processor is a bottleneck since it only has 2 physical cores.

I've read reviews showing the dual-core Sandy Bridge i3-2100 (released 2011) is equal to (if not marginally better than) the FX4100.

While a better video card may net you better FPS and graphics, it's not the only factor determining overall performance, especially in the case of SC2 since a handful of its features at the Extreme level still needs brute processor power and more physical (as opposed to logical) cores.

With this FX4100+GTX670 combination, I would expect constant performance spikes at the Extreme level.