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E8400 @ 4ghz still OK?

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Thinking of moving to a Dx11 card, usual suspects of 5870/480 etc..

Would my CPU be a bottleneck or still acceptable?
 
Depends, mine gets just about maxed out in BC2 @4.5GHz, but I still get great frames with a 5770 (30fps min, 50-70fps all maxed except shadows, 4AF, no AA), so a 5870 would allow for more AA/AF to be piled on. I do feel that some games will be cpu limted for you, but for most you'll have no problems at all.

BC2usage4x.jpg
 
Dev, is your e8400 watercooled at 4.5?

I was thinking of picking up a 2nd hand q9550 or similar but just cba in taking apart the whole PC to replace the cpu
 
Nope, just using a £12 zalman cnps9500 with some MX-3, all in a pretty rubbish case (lots of fans though). Maxes out at 80C in LinX, but never gets anywhere near that in daily use. I would go for a Q9550 if I had the cash myself, but will probably hold out til the next gen of cpus comes out and make the leap to a newer socket. Took quite a push from 4-4.5GHz (1.3-1.36V in CPU-Z, bit more in BIOS), but worth it I guess. Haven't gone further due to cooling issues really.
 
That's a great CPU you have there. I had a strange wolfdale addiction for awhile and went through north of 25 CPUs...only found 2 e8400s that were amazing clockers (as yours is), and around 5 e8500s. Shockingly E8600s were the worst of the bunch when talking extreme clocks!!

actually e8200 and e8300 were. But E8600s were really a ripoff as you had a far better chance of clocking on an E8500.
 
Depends, mine gets just about maxed out in BC2 @4.5GHz

I did some testing a while back, where my 3.2 Q6600 completely trounced my 4.3 E8500 in BFBC2 - the game absolutely adores quad cores :)

Still, a clocked E8500 is still plenty :)
 
I have been offered one for silly money from a friend who has just gone i5, so hopefully will have one by the end of the month fingers crossed :). should be a good upgrade from the E2160 which I am sure is a bottleneck :(....shame as its a cracking CPU
 
That's a great CPU you have there. I had a strange wolfdale addiction for awhile and went through north of 25 CPUs...only found 2 e8400s that were amazing clockers (as yours is), and around 5 e8500s. Shockingly E8600s were the worst of the bunch when talking extreme clocks!!

actually e8200 and e8300 were. But E8600s were really a ripoff as you had a far better chance of clocking on an E8500.

Why thank you. They're great fun to OC, so easy. I might try to push it a bit further once I've finished uni and have some time on my hands, just for lols. If it's stable over 4.8GHz I may invest in a better cooler to actually run it at those temps. Somehow, I think it'll hit the wall around 4.7 and will take a lot just to get there. Great little chips, but I think the time of the dual core is nearing its end unfortunately.
 
I never found a wolfy stable above 4.7GHz. I think you're right that you might hit a wall there. After 4.5-4.6GHz the voltage increase needed is sort of exponential.

I didn't really want to leave dualies either...but the reality is that finally quads are being implemented properly in many games (people were making this argument years ago for the q6600 but I always thought a higher clocked dual was better).

Very pleased with i5 :D
 
I think you would be better off grabbing a 5850 and overclock it.

Look at the Crysis (not optimised for Quad-core) results here for example:
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2010/03/03/overclocking-intel-core-i3-530/8

It's not listed there, but a i7 [email protected] (watercooled) with a 5870 1GB is min 35fps, average 57fps.

Those are results of a 5870 1GB running with various CPUs. The min 33fps, average 57fps is the GPU bound of the 5870 for those settings at Crysis. You can see there a [email protected] only able to push the 5870 1GB to minium 27fps, average 48fps...so it is bottlenecking the 5870 a bit by around 19%~16%. Which is why I think you really should just grab a 5850, instead of paying extra £100 for a 5870 with the risk of no extra performance.
 
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