Thinking of going back to AMD

[SoFGR]

I'll try to make my story as short as possible : Back in 2007 when i replaced my 1900xt with a 8800gt i realized my AMD setup was holding back the card too much ( amd opteron 180 dual core @ 2.75ghz ) so I sold everything amd related and bought a pretty nice combo with little money loss ( E6600 @ 3.3ghz + 2GB ddr2 crucial ballistix + dfi 975x/g ) the difference was astonishing, even at 1600*1200 i had almost double the framerates in TF2 - cod4 - dirt1 - ut3 - bf2142 64man maps etc, minFPS got a healthy boost too, for example i used to hit 30-32fps in 2fort during heavy firefights but never below 50 with the e6600.

My current setup is Q6700 @ 3.3 ghz + a mildy overclocked gtx260, i used a gtx470 during the summer but it was a total dissapointment due to crap drivers and low gpu usage in various games ( bc2 - cod4 - mafia2 etc )

I'm thinking of getting a 6970 + viewsonic V3D241wm on day one if they really worth the money, then sometime during next year I will put the gtx260 back to my rig and build a second one based on AMD this time, problem is that i have completely lost touch with AMD current and future line-up, i only remember reading that dissapointing comparison in [H] between i7 quadro and AMD phenom II last year http://www.hardocp.com/article/2009/01/07/amd_phenom_ii_x4_model_940_black_edition_processor/4

I'm not really interested in building a crossfire setup, I'm sure the input lag catalyst profile fiddling and microstuttering will definately annoy the hell out of me, but I really like high framerates and playing all of my games with a min fps of 60-70 and vsync off, ( my 22" 120hz monitor makes using vsync pointless ) the current setup isn't very much ideal for BC2 for example and the situation got even worse when i upgraded to gtx470.

So is something out there that will give me comparable performance in single threaded cpu bound games ( like bf2142 ) to say a c2d clocked @ 3.5 ghz ? Are amd cpus still weak when compared clock for clock to the competition ? Mind you, if i wanted to buy an intel i wouldn't get i7 anyway because HT and triple channel DDR are not really suited for my needs. So does AMD provide something like an i5 killer these days ? If not then do you believe this would this change during the next few months ? Is anyone there who gets a minfps of 50-60 and a high average with his AMD setup ?

PS : I don't want to start a flame war or anything, I'm currently reading this article http://www.hardocp.com/article/2009/05/19/real_world_gameplay_cpu_scaling/6 as well but I'd like to see more feedback.

PS 2 : I just realized that this article was about quad crossfire and not a single card setup, too bad ....

 

[W.Feather]

Clock for clock the current Phenom II's are roughly equal to the C2 lineup......however as games show the Processor is not the biggest part of gaming anymore......Your more GPU bound......Current line up I would say look at the 1055T, but with BD coming out about the time your saying your looking into doing this, I would say just wait and see what that does.