I'm going to be upgrading my cpu from amd athlon LE-1640 single core processor to an amd athlon II X2 240 dual core processor. It is the only thing I can afford for a while and if I didn't get this processor now I probably would never have gotten it. I've played sims 3 before with the single core but it was very laggy and nasty . The settings even on very low were laggy. But the settings default to high with the single core processor due to the fact my video card bumps up the settings. Since I upgraded to this dual core processor. (haven't gotten it in the mail yet.) How would the sims 3 run? Would the settings go higher (I play on high already not max settings.) What would the fps be?

specs
AMD Athlon II X2 240 2.8 GHZ (Dual core)
RADEON HD 6570
4 GB RAM
WINDOWS VISTA

How would the sims 3 run? what fps and settings?
Also what fps would skyrim and settings and fps would it run with? I Play high on skyrim now but its really laggy because I have and AMD athlon LE-1640. which is single core.

If your Windows Vista is 32-bit, you won't have 4GB RAM available for the game. It's actually 3.2GB, minus whatever RAM is used to run system programs in the background (usually half a GB) and also minus whatever memory is on your video card.

I ran into this myself. I upgraded an old Dell computer with an Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 Wolfdale chip, and the computer is a lot faster. I also went with a 1GB nVidia card and 4GB RAM. The end result means I have about 1.7GB RAM for the game because of the video card. The good news is I can play near-full graphics.

I'd also check the following link to view your DeviceConfig.log file and see what your computer's CPU and GPU ratings are now and also with the new chip installed. That would give you the best answer. Hopefully you get 4s across the board.

http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/307092.page