Minimum cpu for 4870 1GB?

[rogue1979]

Just picked up a couple of Sapphire 4780 1GB for $105 each at the egg.

They were listed as "open box", but there was a crap load of HD 48xx cards there, all priced really low. I figure with the impending release of the 58xx, newegg is just dumping off a bunch of inventory and they are probably new.

Running two C2D's now, both at 3.2GHz, one 2MB L2 cache the other 4MB. Running a 9800GT in one and an HD4830 in the other.

Are these cpu's going to cause a serious bottleneck for the 4870 1GB?
I'm trying to stay somewhat on a budget, and if I need to upgrade I thought maybe the E7500 for $119 (x 2) sounded reasonable.

Both systems have good overclocking motherboards, good ram and good enough power supplies. I was hoping to get closer to 4GHz, would that be better for the upgraded video cards? The E8600 is just flat out overpriced, I can get a decent AMD mobo and X3 720 in that price range.

Open to suggestions here, but remember if I upgrade it will be on two systems, so price is definitely a consideration.

 

[DaveSimmons]

No, even 3 GHz is fine for those cards for at least 9 out of 10 games. So you lose a couple of frames on the 10th game, it won't kill you

 

[cusideabelincoln]

Both processors should be fine. There's definitely no reason for you to "upgrade" your 3.2 GHz 4MB C2D to an E7500 unless you are looking to overclock the E7500 more and/or lower power consumption. Clock for Clock, the E7500 should not outperform the chip with 4MB L2 cache.

At 3.2 GHz the chips should be fast enough to not cause concern when pairing with an HD4870. Would you see benefits from a faster chip? Depends on the game and the resolution. At best I'd say the benefits would be marginal. On average you probably wouldn't notice a huge difference, although the 2MB chip would be of more concern.

 

[betasub]

OP doesn't mention any specific games/apps, or the resolution/detail used.

But generally speaking, there's not going to be much gain from a slightly faster CPU, unless we're talking about a seriously CPU-limited app. If the CPU-limited app benefits from more than 2 cores, tri-cores/quads are a better option than than an OCed top-end dual-core.

 

[rogue1979]

Originally posted by: betasub
OP doesn't mention any specific games/apps, or the resolution/detail used.

But generally speaking, there's not going to be much gain from a slightly faster CPU, unless we're talking about a seriously CPU-limited app. If the CPU-limited app benefits from more than 2 cores, tri-cores/quads are a better option than than an OCed top-end dual-core.

1680 x 1050 on one, 1280 x 1024 on the other. 4XAA and 16XAF, the highest detail possible without dropping below about 30fps. Crysis, Arma2, GTA4 are probably the most graphic challenging games that will be played.


From what you guys have said so far, looks like I'm OK on these two systems for now.