Linkzor

I've got a 1.5 year old trusty Gigabyte GA-M61SME-S2 mobo which has served me well.

A few days ago I picked up a heavily discounted Phenom 9500 and Radeon 4850. After reading several reviews I had high expectations however I was severely let down upon "playing" Crysis.

The performance on older games like Company Of Heroes Opposing Fronts was quite choppy too. I'm running the Catalyst 8.7 Beta drivers right now.

Two quick questions to help me decide whether I should upgrade to an AM2+ mobo.

1. The system bus speed is running at HT1 (2000 MT/s) instead of HT3 (5200mhz). Will this affect performance and by how much?

2. The PCI-E X16 slot only runs in X-8 mode. Again will this impact performance and by how much?

I'm eyeing a Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H which seems to be great value @ that price.

This site owns by the way.

DuckieHo

Be careful with the 9500 and any 780G motherboard. It is known that most 780G motherboard will die with 125w or greater CPUs. The VRM on the motherboards aren't powerful enough. While that CPU has a TDP of 95w, overclocking may stress your motherboard to pre-mature death.

The HT speed won't matter that much. HT bandwidth really matters if you are using onboard video or multiple CPUs.

PCIe 2.0 x8 should be fine for that card.

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alwaysAMD

The problem lies in the Phenom's clock speed. At 2.2ghz, you are bottlenecking the 4850 pretty bad, not to mention most older games won't take advantage of quads, so it's like running a stock +4200 X2, or even a single core +3400. I gained almost 25fps on my 8800GT running Crysis, by going from 2.2ghz to 2.8ghz on Medium with my X2. You need to overclock it, but as the previous poster stated, it's not recommended with that board.

Linkzor

I don't really plan on overclocking the CPU (at least for the next 8 months or so).

What other motherboards would you recommend? What about the 770's or nvidia 8200's?

Edit: Woops I thought Crysis takes advantage of all cores?

Russkiy

With 780G you wont be able to get a stable overclock over 210mhz

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alwaysAMD

Crysis is more clock dependent than amount of cores.

Read this.