When does cpu begn to bottleneck?

[Snow_FOx]

I am looking into getting a new desktop soon.

One issue I see people going back and forth on is a cpu bottleneck on the gpu. I am hoping to run a crossfire 5850. I would stick to a single 5850 if it means going with an amd 955 I won't be able to get much benefit from crossfiring.. However, i would idealistically like a crossfired rig.

From what I have read there isn't much difference between the 955 and i7 in gaming.. Is a cpu bottleneck something I should seriously worry about? or will real world application be absolutely fine? ( note i'm mostly refering to gaming).

 

[Dark4ng3l]

Why do you feel the absolute need to crossfire anyways? Just get a 5870 and use that then in the future when prices are lower and you feel the need for more power you buy another one and it extends your systems life. As for the cpu thing, these days your are better off spending more on a video card than a cpu. The 955 is plenty good enough for gaming especially if you overclock it. The i7 is going to be faster but you won't see that much in current games (I guess with current video cards but if you get something significantly more powerful down the line it would make a difference).

Really these days with the 8x AA and extremely high resolution/eyefinity setups people like to run the video card is usually the bottleneck for game performance. Now of course if your talking about system wide performance then the HDD is going to be the bottleneck in a ton of scenarios.

 

[betasub]

LMGTFY... Nah, even easier just read articles by our very own ATFer, BFG on http://alienbabeltech.com/main/?author=5

 

[toyota]

LMGTFY... Nah, even easier just read articles by our very own ATFer, BFG on http://alienbabeltech.com/main/?author=5

worst place to go for that topic.

 

[Snow_FOx]

Why do you feel the absolute need to crossfire anyways? Just get a 5870 and use that then in the future when prices are lower and you feel the need for more power you buy another one and it extends your systems life.

Because a single 5870 is 100$ more expensive now? and because I am getting tax returns soon which pays for my 5850 now.. and my birthday is coming up in a few months.. At which point I can get another 5850 and crossfire.

No doubt a 5870 is sufficient for most games on the market.. Hell a 5850 is probably more than enough for most games. However, there are two situations I would like to avoid.

A. Sitting on a psu capable of powering two high end cards and never doing it.

B. Not going for the psu capable of powering two high end cards and having to shell out another 150$ or more later.

It seems smarter to me to just go ahead and plan for it. Is it over kill? absolutely.

Does that make me want it any less?
Nope.

I also like the idea of knowing I will have a rig that will last a long time from the word go.

I would also like to point out that my birthday heck if not both purchases will most likely be after fermi is released. So if prices are gunna drop.. they will have already done so.

 

[soccerballtux]

as long as you overclock the cpu-nb (L3 cache) to 2.6-2.8ghz on your 955, and of course the cores to probably 3.7ghz (both easily doable), you will not be bottlenecked with the 5850 crossfire.
but the L3 is key here