Minimum CPU for a GTX 970?

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Nikko G

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Aug 25, 2015
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So basically, what CPU is the minimum I can pair with a 970 without bottleneck? Would a Pentium G3258 OC'ed to 4.2 GHz or Athlon 860k OC'ed to 4.8 GHz be enough?
 
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geofelt
Think more in terms of what is appropriate for YOUR games.
A GTX970 will run most games well at 1080P.
If your games are primarily multiplayer, then a quad is appropriate.
Otherwise, many games will use only 2-3 cores and will depend on superior single core speeds. MMO, sims, strategy games are in this category.

A i3-6100 @$125 skylake will do very well as a budget cpu.
If you have the funds, a i5-6600K with an overclock is as good as it gets, but it costs twice as much.
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jeffredo

jeffredo

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Nov 15, 2008
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I've used a GTX 970 with a Pentium G3258 @ 4.5 Ghz. It was substantially faster overall than the GTX 960 I also own. That said it would choke in certain CPU intensive areas - most recently in Fallout 4. Yes, an i5 (Haswell or Skylake) would be the best starting point.
 
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t99

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Jul 16, 2014
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Get at least i-5 4440 to not have issues. Pentium is not bad if your playing games that don't need a quad core cpu, but if you have a 970 then I would imagine your not playing those type of games most of the time. A Skylake i-3 would actually be better than the OCd Pentium because at least the i-3 is threaded so it performs somewhat better than the Pentium for quad core required games. It will at least start the games and run them, but you will need to have the cpu intensive settings turned off.

 
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geofelt

geofelt

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Oct 9, 2006
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Think more in terms of what is appropriate for YOUR games.
A GTX970 will run most games well at 1080P.
If your games are primarily multiplayer, then a quad is appropriate.
Otherwise, many games will use only 2-3 cores and will depend on superior single core speeds. MMO, sims, strategy games are in this category.

A i3-6100 @$125 skylake will do very well as a budget cpu.
If you have the funds, a i5-6600K with an overclock is as good as it gets, but it costs twice as much.
 
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