Will FX60 help?

[martman]

I know I am subjecting myself to the venerable "get an opty and overclock" flames. I dont have the proper "know how" to overclock successfully ( I failed miserably in other attempts) and have no desire to try again...(got the crap scared outta me a couple times..lol)..so with that said, I have read in other threads that a system similar to mine is cpu limited. Will I see a big improvement in gaming with a FX 60? especially if I decide to update my graphics card or go with SLI?
my system specs below:

Thermaltake Armor VA8000 case
AMD Athlon 64 4000+
Gigabyte K8N-Pro-SLI
OCZ Platinum Dual Channel 4x1024mb(2-3-2-5)
WD 250 gb SATA2 @7200rpm
Ultra X2 modular 550 watt psu
EVGA 256mb Nvidia 7800 GT (470 core- 1.1 ghz mem)
19? Samsung 930B @1280x1024
Sound Blaster Audigy 2ZS
Creative 2.1 80 watt (semi-surround)..lol
HP Lightscribe
Logitech G7 Laser cordless mouse
Saitek Eclipse keyboard

 

[MBrown]

Well if you are considering overclocking which I can see you prolly arent going to, I guess gigabyte isnt a good overclocking board. I believe 3200+ and under are bottlenecks for the GeForce7 series. You might not see as big a difference now between the Fx-60 and the 4000 in gaming now but you will later on.

I'm going to say it anyway. Get an opty 165 or 170 and overclock it and get a different motherboard. Thats what I'm going do once I get the cash.

 

[dguy6789]

In single threaded programs or when you are doing one thing at a time you will see no real gain. But if you decide to do two or more things that each take a lot of power, you will see massive gains.

 

[robertk2012]

is your ram running at 1T or 2T? You might be better off with just 2 sticks of ram running at 1T

 

[compgeek89]

The gigabyte boards SUCK for OCing... I had one, I know the problems and scares. Get something better and OCing is a breeze.

 

[dguy6789]

Originally posted by: robertk2012
is your ram running at 1T or 2T? You might be better off with just 2 sticks of ram running at 1T

There is no one in the world who will notice the difference between 2T and 1T when using an Athlon 64 based computer. The difference is under 3% in all scenarios except for synthetic benchmarks that also happen to say the Athlon XP 3000+ compares to the Athlon 64 3500+... (cough sandra cough)

 

[imported_miahallen]

Did anybody read his original question??? He does not want to OC!!! But nobody wants to tell him how to best increase his gameing performance, even though he hinted he's thinking about it (SLI). I hate it when forum member have one track minds...read the darn question before giving a response please!

martman,

dguy gave the best answer to your question about single-threaded VS muli-threaded apps. Today, games are primarily single. So, your performance increase with an FX-60 would be minimal, if any. But that will change as newer games are programed to take advantage of the multi-core systems on the market.

Secondly, and nobody said this yet, but you say you've also been thinking about SLI...THIS WILL BENEFIT YOU MOST for the games you already own, and will also bennefit you for games of tomorrow. Get another 7800GT, and wait on a new proc until games can take advantage of it (and when prices fall).

Lastly, you would see a good performance increase in your system when multitasking with the FX-60 upgrade.

Good Luck!

 

[martman]

Originally posted by: miahallen
Did anybody read his original question??? He does not want to OC!!! But nobody wants to tell him how to best increase his gameing performance, even though he hinted he's thinking about it (SLI). I hate it when forum member have one track minds...read the darn question before giving a response please!

martman,

dguy gave the best answer to your question about single-threaded VS muli-threaded apps. Today, games are primarily single. So, your performance increase with an FX-60 would be minimal, if any. But that will change as newer games are programed to take advantage of the multi-core systems on the market.

Secondly, and nobody said this yet, but you say you've also been thinking about SLI...THIS WILL BENEFIT YOU MOST for the games you already own, and will also bennefit you for games of tomorrow. Get another 7800GT, and wait on a new proc until games can take advantage of it (and when prices fall).

Lastly, you would see a good performance increase in your system when multitasking with the FX-60 upgrade.

Good Luck!

I guess the next thing on my mind would be "if I go SLI now...would my processor be a bottleneck?" ..but what you say makes sense.. it seems some e-tailers are starting to lower prices on the 7800gt's..while the FX60 isnt going down much in price. Maybe after the new M2 AMD's are realesed then the socket 939's will lower in price?(hopefully the FX60)

 

[imported_miahallen]

I guess the next thing on my mind would be "if I go SLI now...would my processor be a bottleneck?" ..but what you say makes sense.. it seems some e-tailers are starting to lower prices on the 7800gt's..while the FX60 isnt going down much in price. Maybe after the new M2 AMD's are realesed then the socket 939's will lower in price?(hopefully the FX60)

The 4000+ runs at stock speeds of 2.4GHz, the FX-60 runs at stock speeds of 2.6GHz per core. Because of what I said earlier about games being single-threaded, the FX-60 would be only using one core for the games you are currently playing, so you can compare the speed apples to apples 2.4Ghz VS 2.6GHz... an 8% advantage with the FX-60 hardly seems worth $1000.

And you are correct, as the AM2 procs hit the market (especially an FX high end part), the 939's will decrease in price.

 

[martman]

Originally posted by: miahallen

I guess the next thing on my mind would be "if I go SLI now...would my processor be a bottleneck?" ..but what you say makes sense.. it seems some e-tailers are starting to lower prices on the 7800gt's..while the FX60 isnt going down much in price. Maybe after the new M2 AMD's are realesed then the socket 939's will lower in price?(hopefully the FX60)

The 4000+ runs at stock speeds of 2.4GHz, the FX-60 runs at stock speeds of 2.6GHz per core. Because of what I said earlier about games being single-threaded, the FX-60 would be only using one core for the games you are currently playing, so you can compare the speed apples to apples 2.4Ghz VS 2.6GHz... an 8% advantage with the FX-60 hardly seems worth $1000.

And you are correct, as the AM2 procs hit the market (especially an FX high end part), the 939's will decrease in price.

Thanks miahallen.. sometimes the reasoning from another source helps when waivering on a possible high dollar decision.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Originally posted by: MBrown
Well if you are considering overclocking which I can see you prolly arent going to, I guess gigabyte isnt a good overclocking board. I believe 3200+ and under are bottlenecks for the GeForce7 series. You might not see as big a difference now between the Fx-60 and the 4000 in gaming now but you will later on.

I'm going to say it anyway. Get an opty 165 or 170 and overclock it and get a different motherboard. Thats what I'm going do once I get the cash.

The 3200+ is NOT a bottlekneck for the 7800. Most games don't even get CPU limited these days. With all the features running there isn't much difference between a 3000+ and a 3200+ using the same card. There will likely be a marginal fps increase in older games at 1024x768, but 1280x1024 and up with AA and AF rely mostly on the GPU.