Prideless

My main goal is to get a cpu+motherboard+ram build that can do crossfire 4870's and hold at 60 frames without a cpu bottleneck. on games at max settings 1080p.


I am looking at

AMD Athlon II x4 630 = $112
AM3 790GX Gigabyte Motherboard = $114
DDR3 1600 G. Skill 4GB = $95

approx ~ $325

or swap the CPU with Phenom II x4 965 which is $195

question - although its am3 will the board bottleneck the amd 6-way cores next year because its not tri-channel?

is there any benefit for me to get something beyond athlon ii 630 if my criteria is to hold the line in games max settings at 60 frames.

what is the best performance for the buck right now?

need advice assuming budget is NOT an issue. taking my criteria in mind.

thanks in advance.

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Amdkillsintel

I think AMD would do a drop in upgrade to their 6 core chips with just a bios flash. phenom II should run better than the athlon due to more cache, more specifically a L3 cache.

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Zeifer

Tri-cores seem to be the sweet spot for gaming, and there's always a chance you can unlock to to a quad.

The Phenom IIs compared to the Athlon IIs are only 5% faster clock for clock (due to L3 cache). However, clock speed is what really dominates games. The 965 will get a beastly overclock, but the Athlon II you listed should still hit 3.6GHz easy.

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Prideless

I am now considering Phenom II X4 955 or Athlon II X4 630.

Its at 3.2 and apparently the wall is 3.8 which is weird the same wall for the 965 is also 3.8, so is there any benefit to go 965?

630 can get a 1ghz overclock while the 955 can get a 600mhz overclock correct?

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Darksylum

I will tell you this right now, look at my system and my overclock. i can not max every game I have at 60 fps, most are fine but even some older games will choke at some point in time. It depends on your FSAA and AF settings. At that resolution (1080P) it can be realy demanding. I would recomend you get whatever cpu has the highest clock speed + Cache count. That will help make sure you do not bottle neck the vid cards. but do not expect 2x 4870s to max everything you throw at it. Even tho they are great cards you will still fps lock on some games under 60fps depending on shadows, texture settings and filtering + multi samples. suposedly to elliminate any bottle neck with 4870s you need atleast 1 core per card running at 3.2ghz. Atleast thats the line of crap AMD tried to feed me. In my own results I have found that the more you push the cpu (even my quad) the higher the frame rates go in every game. I did not start to get deminishing returns until 3.8ghz and then the frame rate gains started to slow down alot. So like i said, do not get over happy with cores. focus on higher clocks + cache counts to push your 4870s tot he max. The PhenomII X2 550BE would be a good start in your budget range, It has great clocks and a crap load more on chip memory than those crudy little AthlonII x4 chips. Most people have been able to unlock the disabled cores on the PII X2 550 also so if you end up needing more multithreaded support it is there just hiding.

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Prideless

gosh thats crazy, so what games at 1080p with your rig cant hold at 60 frames excluding crysis and gta iv?

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Im learning a lot more about comps here then I ever did. =D So many helpful ppl.