GTX 680 to 970 with i7 860. Worth it or waste of $?

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Xerodeluxe

Gawd
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Jul 25, 2004
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Hey guys I made a thread about a few weeks ago about upgrading my Radeon 4890. Well, I upgraded to a GTX 680 since my friend was selling his to get a 970. While the 680 is doing great especially on 1080p, I feel like I can do a bit better. I plan on getting at 970 since its within my new price range. Well, my question is is it worth upgrade to a 970 even with a i7 860? I dont want to upgrade to a new processor if I dont need it. Otherwise ill be spending on a new CPU, mobo, and possibly new RAM to accommodate a 970 (which would cost me about $4-500 extra. Any suggestions would help. Thanks!
 
I wanna give a more specific answer to this but I just don't have enougn information at the moment, see my thread on the Intel Processors sub.

To answer OP yes it will be a bottleneck especially at 1080p I just recently made the jump from the 680 to the 970 and I have noticed a huge bottleneck in some games and that's at 1200p and with my CPU clocked at 4.1Ghz the 860 is basiclly the same CPU with Hyper Thread and I doubt that would solve it as in some games I see the GPU hovering at around 50% while the CPU is at 70-80%+ with spikes.

To cut it short some games it will bottleneck some I have not noticed it depends on what you are going to play, is it worth it ? yes but only if you plan on uprading the rest of the system.

Just wanna add all this is from my own experience with certain games at certain places, some other users might have a different opinion.
 
You will get much higher frame rates. Depending on resolution, the CPU may bottleneck some games, but it is still worth upgrading. I'd keep the res at at least 2048x1536 to get rid of most bottlenecks. 2560x1920+ should be perfect bottleneck-free. 1600x1200 and below will start to have major CPU limits.

You can overclock the CPU to reduce issues.
 
rabidz7 said:
You will get much higher frame rates. Depending on resolution, the CPU may bottleneck some games, but it is still worth upgrading. I'd keep the res at at least 2048x1536 to get rid of most bottlenecks. 2560x1920+ should be perfect bottleneck-free. 1600x1200 and below will start to have major CPU limits.

You can overclock the CPU to reduce issues.
Click to expand...

I'd say it's fairly safe on this forum to assume that someone will not have a CRT unless specifically stated, thereby making any reference to them a bit pointless outside of a thread about CRTs.
 
I'm on the i7 860 at 3.8GHz with a r280x (I understand that this isn't as fast as a 970, but generally AMD's drivers have greater overhead than NVidia's) at 1920x1200--no notable holdups.

If anything, unless games get much more cpu-intensive, the multi-core nature of DX12/Vulcan will help our old chipsets stay valid (since our single thread performance is well down compared to newer stuff).
 
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