Allright, I've been off for a while but I'm about to put together a new build.
I want something in the 700 USD range, so the 2 CPUs I've been looking at are the Q9550 and X4 955.
I'm going towards a 4870 because it's a good bang-for-the-buck card, I haven't been able to find any other card that good for that much money.
So far I think the X4 955 wins, it's $199 on newegg and beats the Q9550 on most tests (barely) and does good with graphics.
But I don't know if the 4870 will bottleneck the 955, maybe this quad core is too good for the 4870. So the point is that I want to get the right combo so that both the CPU and GPU will work together at their limits, and I don't know what that is. Will a phenom 940 or a Q8400 yorkfield do just as well with this card? If yes, then I'll get that because they are cheaper.
Also, I know I can get an i7 for 280 bucks which is a beast CPU, but I dont know if it will be that much better in games because of the 4870 card. See the point?
So I want some of you up-to-date gurus to fill me in. I haven't been following this stuff closely since the P4/AMD 64 3400+ "era"
thx
I want something in the 700 USD range, so the 2 CPUs I've been looking at are the Q9550 and X4 955.
I'm going towards a 4870 because it's a good bang-for-the-buck card, I haven't been able to find any other card that good for that much money.
So far I think the X4 955 wins, it's $199 on newegg and beats the Q9550 on most tests (barely) and does good with graphics.
But I don't know if the 4870 will bottleneck the 955, maybe this quad core is too good for the 4870. So the point is that I want to get the right combo so that both the CPU and GPU will work together at their limits, and I don't know what that is. Will a phenom 940 or a Q8400 yorkfield do just as well with this card? If yes, then I'll get that because they are cheaper.
Also, I know I can get an i7 for 280 bucks which is a beast CPU, but I dont know if it will be that much better in games because of the 4870 card. See the point?
So I want some of you up-to-date gurus to fill me in. I haven't been following this stuff closely since the P4/AMD 64 3400+ "era"
thx