Will my C2D bottleneck a 5870

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Cheezor722

Weaksauce
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Mar 13, 2008
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I want to a throw a 5870 into my existing rig, but i'm wondering if my E2160 @3.15ghz is going to bottleneck it. I realize most of this will just be conjecture, but I'm interested if others are running systems similar to mine with the 5870 or other powerful current gen Graphics cards.

Current System:

Abit IP35-E rev 1.4
Intel E2160 (350FSB x 9 = 3.15ghz @ 1.325vCore)
A-DATA 4GB(2 x 2GB) DDR2 800 -- 876mhz 5-5-5-18@1.95V
eVGA 8800gts 512mb (G92) @ 740/1800/1040
Antec NeoPower 550w
Samsung Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit


Also, would I see any leap in performance upgrading to a i5-750 with new motherboard and ddr3 ram instead of the 5870?
 
Both times, depends on the res.

If you're at 1920*1200 or lower I'd say you're bottlenecking the 5870.

If you're at low resolutions you would see a boost going i5 (DDR3 makes no difference) with a similar overclock.
 
Easiest way I think is to go to an AMD phenom X4 & board that will take your DDR2.
 
While there might be a slight bottleneck on certain games, it will not hinder your gaming experience.
 
2xxx Pentium cpus are way slower clock for clock than even the high end Core 2 Duos not to mention the i5/i7. I think it would be foolish to go with a 5870 over the 5850. when they are both pushed to their max the 5850 will be within 5% of the 5870. with your cpu you will never even see that 5% because it will be a slight bottleneck before you reach the potential of even a stock 5850.

and no in most cases you would not see any big improvements by going to an i5 while sticking with your current gpu. the i5 would certainly be much more important if you were using a 5850 or better though.
 
While the 2x00 series of cpus get very very similar results to the 7x00 and 8x00 series of cpus once you overclock in many traditional tasks, in gaming the extra cache makes a big difference. And unfortunately the the 2x00 series has only 1 meg of l2 cache.

Comparing a high end 8x00 series vs an i5/i7 you only get about 20% higher minimum frames with the i5/i7. But with the 2x00 series we are talking much different results (sorry I don't have links to back up what I am saying).

That said upgrade your gpu to at least 58X0 series before upgrading your cpu. I would do a 5850 with your processor.
 
Thanks everyone for the replies.

So it sounds like the biggest problem with my processor is the small cache size which will cause a bottleneck during gaming. But it'd still be a better buy to get a 5850 over a new CPU/mobo/ram.

From Roland00's post above, it sounds like I'll be getting 30-40% lower frames with my 2160 vs an i5 or i7. With such a large performance hit, would it be possible performance would be nearly as low as my 8800gts? I'm unclear on how much of an increase I would actually see.
 
It really depends on the game. Some games are pretty CPU dependant, others dont care what sort of CPU you have. Some games you might see 100% increase, others you might only see a few percent.
 
you will get an improvement in every game and in most cases it will be significant. you certainly wont get all the 5850 is capable of though in those games where a strong cpu is important too. if the 5850 wasnt 300 bucks then I would say go for it. however at 300 bucks thats a lot of money for a card that you cant fully utilize.
 
it really narrows down to what game you play..

different game have different scaling.

games like Crysis is always GPU demanding as long as you have a 2.8G+ DualCore or better
 
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