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Spec me a GPU; is my old i7 a bottleneck?

tezmo

tezmo

tezmo

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Joined
5 Jan 2005
Posts
312
Gentlemen,

I have an i7-860 on a GA-P55-UD3 - it is coupled with a radeon 5770, which doesn't cut the mustard no mo. 16GB, SSD etc etc.

What can I get GPU wise for ~£200 that won't be hampered by this older architecture - if indeed anything would be hampered by it? I'm wanting to crank games up as far as they'll go for the dollar - in which there might be a certain amount of wiggle room - its christmas after all!

Thank you all :)
 
You got that thing overclocked?

choice with your budget could be either a 270x which is compared to the 7870 I believe, or stretch your budget out a little more and possibly get a 280x which is compared to a 7970 GHz i think, not that clued up on the new 2x0 cards, Dare someone will come and give a better recommendation for ya.
 
HD7950 if you can find any left, R9 270X if not. Your CPU would be fine with either of those, especially if you OC it, the i7-8xx are slightly better than the i7-9xx from a gaming POV and many people still run them.
 
no overclocking peeps; it was built at a time I was obsessing with low temps etc and is all running at stock.

sounds like the CPU causes no troubles at all - good to know!

tricky choice now since the r9 270x comes in slightly under budget, e.g. http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-328-SP&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=1982 whereas the r9 280x is slightly over budget like
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-322-SP&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=1842

Seems like you get an extra 10-15% out of the 280X but the £ increase is that much larger. Decisions decisions!
 
Is your CPU overclocked? With a decent OC the older i7s won't be much of a bottleneck at all with single GPUs in this price range. You can still find new 7950s with three free games for about £175 if you look around. See a few at £209 too and a 7950 would be more ideal than a 270X.

There will be a performance increase with the 7950/280X, but most notably that extra 1GB Vram and memory bandwidth could possibly make the card more relevant for an extra year in the long run, if you're thinking of keeping it for a few years.
 
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While slightly over budget a 280x would be your best bet keep an eye on deals. Your cpu is fine with mantle it will be overkill
 
If you have a decent case with decent airflow, give that cpu little overclock and see how you get on, but I'd see if you can push that budget a little and get a 280x, that 3gb vram will help you massively with games such as BF4 recommending 3gb's of the stuff.

Though my 770 2gb is handling BF4 on Ultra no problem.
 
Thank you all for your thoughts - I am going to keep my eyes peeled for a deal on a 280x - I like the thought of the 3GB vram, and that they seem to run cooler and quieter than the equivalent 7xxx cards.
 
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