Recently upgraded my x1900xt to hd 4870, card seems to be working good. I had issues when I first installed 4870, my pc would hang up on the windows login screen every time. Went to BIOS and set everything to auto, it booted up perfectly. But every time I try to go to BIOS and overclock my cpu back to where I had it, it would hang at the login screen again. I'm thinking that my mobo can't provide the power required for both 4870 and overclocked FX-60. Could it possibly be something else that I overlooked?
 
FX-60 on A8R32-MVP Deluxe, 2 GB OCZ DDR 400, Diamond HD 4870, SeaSonic SS-650HT, 74GB Raptor and 300GB for storage, SAMSUNG SH-S203N, NZXT Tempest.

I think your right.......you may not be able to power that 4870 with enough juice and overclock the processor. The newer mobo's have a plug in to help the mobo with the extra power...I know mine has one also. I had a opty 185 myself at one time and a A8N32x and that was ASUS's best mobo. It did not have the extra power either. I'm sure you won't be able to overclock you cpu anymore. You won't gain a bunch anyway with the older socket 939's when you overclock. Maybe a frame or 2. That new card should still allow you to play everything without overclocking anything

As a fellow FX-60 owner what did you get your FX-60 OC'd to?  I tried in the past to OC mine, its stable at 2.8, but much past that problems start.

I am thinking the memory timings might have to be auto but the CPU might still get an overclock.  You can only go so far with the memory.
 

Got it to 2.8 first, using normal voltage. 2.9 was pretty easy with voltage bumping. I got it to 3.0 and had stability issues, but I think they were solvable, I just didn't try hard enough and left it at 2.9. Now, with 4870, I upped the clock to 215 and left mulitplier at 13, can't get any higher. Was going to try hard and get it to 3.0 with this video card, but no go...  
Thinking I might just not wait anymore and switch to Q9450...

quad cores are cool

With that amd your not going to get too much frame improvement vs just getting an intel system like I did....my q6600 compared to exactly what you have was no comparison......all the new intel cpu's are smoking fast. Unless you get a 9850 or 9950 and even then you can get better bang for you buck with the Q9450 that you mentioned

 
If I recall correctly from my FX-60 days, if you overclock your FSB you never know what it's going to do unless you turn your HT multiplier down (the FX-60 will go up in flames long before 4 is too high for it).
Hope that helps.

 
I went with a e8500, since I don't video edit and it will be another four or five years before games are optimized past two cores anyway, so the overclockability of the dual cores is a no brainer.
 
Just don't get any Nvidia chipsets, or preferably GPUs either for that matter but they are far more stable in an Intel chipset.

 
Sorry i can't halp you with this, but i have a question. What is your 3dmark06 score with the 4870? I have 5600+ and the score is 10700, so i wondered if the card is ok or that is normal with that processor.
Tnx.