• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Minimum CPU for 7970?

L

[L]imey

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jan 9, 2009
Messages
2,046
Hi Guys,

So I may have finally convinced my wife to do some gaming with me, but rather than build a full new rig for her, I thought I might re appropriate some of my existing parts in my gaming rig to get a second one operational. So, I'll be reusing one of my 7970's, one of my SSDs, one of my storage drives, half my ram (16gb).

That leaves me to buy cpu, mobo, psu, and case.

I don't expect to need more than a 450w psu with 2 8 pins to handle the vid card, but beyond that I'm not sure how much cpu to buy to keep 1080p functioning properly.

Will an ivy pentium get the job done? Do I need an I3? does AMD have any comparable alternatives?

Your thoughts?

Thanks in advance
 
for the AMD side i vote for FX8350 or FX8320.. or the intel side and to keep fed the 7970. any i5 sandy or ivy will do the job nicely and can be find right now at super cheap prices(I saw recently a i5 3570 in 180$).. no need to be only any "K" version, any less than a i5 sandy will bottleneck that HD7970, well lets no say bottleneck(over-used term this days) but you will not enjoy the full performance of the card.
 
If you can find some used parts for intel socket 1366 (x58) then that would also work very well as the cpu's (i7-920-930) can be had for around $100 on ebay and they clock up nice as i have a i7-930 running at 4Ghz feeding a 7950 which once you overclock them they are as fast as anything AMD makes and not far behind anything Intel makes as to say they hold there own in todays market.
 
fanboy said:
If you can find some used parts for intel socket 1366 (x58) then that would also work very well as the cpu's (i7-920-930) can be had for around $100 on ebay and they clock up nice as i have a i7-930 running at 4Ghz feeding a 7950 which once you overclock them they are as fast as anything AMD makes and not far behind anything Intel makes as to say they hold there own in todays market.
Click to expand...

Lol you dont need to overclock it to be as fast as anything amd makes. Multi gpu id bet a stock 930 would beat a 8350fx at any resolution. Still if your bothering to upgrade I'd go 3570k or 4670k for pcie 3.0 future proof.
 
bAMtan2 said:
[citation needed]
Click to expand...

For what ? When I had my 780 even if I ran bf3 at high settings with no aa in some 64 player maps my GPU usage would drop down to 80% at times. Yes this was minimum but it was caused by CPU. An fx6300 wouldn't even touch my CPU in any circumstances. Not even in the ballpark. I'm going for a 100hz minimum in bf3 tho. Others would be fine with 50-60fps minimum. A 6300 is not capable of staying above 60fps at all times in full 64 player conquest. Maybe in tdm as its much less demanding on CPU. Bf4 is probably going to be worse. Bf3 was much worse than bfbc2 so if the trend continues.
 
Last edited:
HOODedDutchman said:
For what ? When I had my 780 even if I ran bf3 at high settings with no aa in some 64 player maps my GPU usage would drop down to 80% at times. Yes this was minimum but it was caused by CPU. An fx6300 wouldn't even touch my CPU in any circumstances. Not even in the ballpark. I'm going for a 100hz minimum in bf3 tho. Others would be fine with 50-60fps minimum. A 6300 is not capable of staying above 60fps at all times in full 64 player conquest. Maybe in tdm as its much less demanding on CPU. Bf4 is probably going to be worse. Bf3 was much worse than bfbc2 so if the trend continues.
Click to expand...

So your theory is that your GPU usage being at 80% means your CPU is bottle-necking it? While I admit I am not too familiar with the BF3 engine I just don't see it. Did you take the same video card to a similar system with a faster cpu and got different results? The video card at 80% I would think would mean that simply it is more then capable of handling what the game is trying to draw. Having more players on a game isn't going to add too much work for the cpu either, unless the engine is doing some sort of physics prediction in between positional packets.
 
atom said:
So your theory is that your GPU usage being at 80% means your CPU is bottle-necking it? While I admit I am not too familiar with the BF3 engine I just don't see it. Did you take the same video card to a similar system with a faster cpu and got different results? The video card at 80% I would think would mean that simply it is more then capable of handling what the game is trying to draw. Having more players on a game isn't going to add too much work for the cpu either, unless the engine is doing some sort of physics prediction in between positional packets.
Click to expand...

If you'd played the game you'd know what I mean. It is the CPU . adding more players adds a lot more load to the CPU in bf3. If I run ultra I'm pegged at 99%. The only way it wouldn't be a CPU bottleneck is if I was running vsync. Which I'm not. I went from a 2500k at 4.7ghz to a 3930k and my fps went up huge along with GPU usage. This is the way bf3 works. I'm sure it is the most CPU intense game around when in full 64 player conquest servers. Unless u run 60hz vsync of course.
 
atom said:
If you run Ultra and its 99% you confirm exactly what I'm saying.
Click to expand...

No because ultra puts more load on GPU causing lower frame rates and less stress on the CPU as its not trying to keep up with the crazy high frame rates the GPU is pushing. Lower settings = more CPU load less GPU load. Higher settings mean more GPU load less CPU load.
 
My i7 930 handles all the games I've thrown at it with SLI 780s. Perhaps I would gain some frames from more CPU power, but by anybody's standards my gaming experience is buttery smooth, even on the 64p maps in BF3.
 
Tych-0 said:
My i7 930 handles all the games I've thrown at it with SLI 780s. Perhaps I would gain some frames from more CPU power, but by anybody's standards my gaming experience is buttery smooth, even on the 64p maps in BF3.
Click to expand...

Yes but 2560 res. Meaning more GPU load with more than double pixels of 1080p. So 930 should b plenty.
 
More CPU power if you go crossfire. My 2500k doesn't give me the full power of my 680's.
 
Still rockin the I7-920@3.6ghz with 2x 7970's. No plans on upgrading.
 
My FX-8120 runs BF3 as smooth as a baby's ass. I've never seen slowdown even when there are 64 people crammed into one team's spawn area. No mouse lag, audio lag, or stuttering. I can even play the game and render a livestream at the same time if I turn 1 setting from Ultra to High. Multithreaded applications are what the FX series is good at. Never ran Crossfire in my system so can't comment on multi GPU setups.

In the [H] BF3 thread, some people who run Intel CPUs have to cut off hyperthreading when running BF3 because of issues that you just listed. Some weird game bug from what I understand. Maybe try that HoodedDutchman.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top