Should I grab a 4870 1GB on a dated PC?

[zmatt]

Well if he's playing at 1080p resolution, I wouldn't really be worrying about CPU Bottlebeck. At that resolution the CPU would have little to no problem

For about a week I ran a 4850 with an Opteron 165. Even overclocked to 2.1ghz the Opty was a major bottleneck in gaming. The s939 chips are just too old to tackle today's games. If he wants to full utilize that 4870 he should get a faster chip, and due to the age of the system that also means a new motherboard and ram, and probably power supply.

 

[gurusan]

yeah even at 1080p the CPU will majorly bottleneck the system...but he should still get the 4870

 

[zmatt]

When I switched to the e7200 my 3dmark score doubled, and that was wit the 4850 both times.

On the Opty I actually didn't see a big improvement in gaming performance with the 4850 over the 7900GS. I still could only play Oblivion at medium settings. That's how bad the bottle neck was.