£500 build

[stulid]

The GTX570 would be massively bottlenecked by the naff Athlon CPU,

You claim most games are GPU bottlenecked,

However, most games will be GPU bottle necked if you want to max out your PCs performance by setting your game settings to max at which the CPU becomes a far less important factor.

So how do you explain the newer more efficient clock for clock Sandybridge CPus completely destroying the best AMD has to offer while using high end GPU's, you can clearly see how the fast GPU is being held back in all those charts.


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But its still a moot point as there is ZERO guarantee that any of the cores will unlock anyways, if the motherboard even supports core unlocking?

 

[Marine-RX179]

That's exactly it. CPU vs CPU its no contest and Im not disputing that. However, most games will be GPU bottle necked if you want to max out your PCs performance by setting your game settings to max at which the CPU becomes a far less important factor.

"also set the resolution to 1,680 x 1,050 with no AA and no AF to provide a reasonably real-world test without the risk that the graphics card will be a limiting factor to CPU performance."

Those tests are clearly stressing CPUs only. Check out some CPU tests at max graphics settings.

Do you even have any idea what would happen when CPU bottleneck occur in games? It doesn't matter if you got a fast graphic card, the GPU usage will drop to so low, and the frame rate drop together with it.

You looked at the bit-tech review, and clearly failed to interpret what it means...

 

[Flashheart]

You guy's are the best.

Thanks guys, I'm going to approach my man with Stulid's second build I think. It's pretty awesome what a man can get for circa £500 these days. Probably due to low ram prices and fierce amd/nvidia competition.

 

[Reaper 392]

if you want any more evidence that the CPU will be a bottleneck, i have a phenom II X4 955 BE and occasionally it bottlenecks my GTX460 depending on what game im playing. how on earth do you think an unlocked athlon X2 is going to work with a GTX570?

 

[JamesM]

I'd overclock your X4 if you can Reaper. My 955 running at 4GHz doesn't bottleneck my 460 as near as much as it did at stock!