Without Mantle, he will need to OC past 4.5GHz in order to be fine. I have my Core i7 3770K at 4441MHz with an HD7950 @ 1GHz. At 4GHz there were times that fps where going below 60fps. It all depends on the map and the number of players.
At Operation Locker he will be fine, in open maps like Siege Of Shanghai he will need to OC at least to 4.4-4.5GHz if he wants to stay at or above 60fps.
Also depends on settings. I don't play on Ultra on BF4. I just see so little visual improvement that it's not really worth it. I've seen the screenshot differences and it was so tiny for the FPS hit, I decided that I'd rather have better FPS. With my i7 4770k, running at stock, I've never seen a point where I've had a "stutter" or any sort.
So it all depends on the settings. Drop a setting that has low visual improvement to FPS impact and you'll be fine.
Most people ITT that are stating "You need XYZ to run the game!!!!" Are talking about running it at the highest settings possible.
Does anyone with a GTX 780Ti will play at 1080p and turn off Anisotropic Filtering and MSAA ????
Does anyone playing Multiplayer leaves Motion Blur ON ?? :whiste:
Even if you need 120fps, a 4GHz FX6300 will do the job at the same settings.
Those graphs are nice to get an idea of how the CPUs are performing. But the performance completely changes with different settings and different GPUs.
Same applies for every game.
http://gamegpu.ru/action-/-fps-/-tps/battlefield-4-second-assault-test-gpu.html
Basically what I'm trying to say. The issue is many people worry about ALL THE SETTINGS.
If you want to turn every single thing all the way up, then you should just own the top of the line of everything. But if you just want to run the game with 98% of the visual quality and ignore the last 2% that gives large FPS drops then you'll get vastly improved frame rates.