I have a Sapphire AGP 3850 with a Zalman VF700 AlCu cooling upgrade, 4x1gb OCZ PC3200 Platinum memory, and an Asus A8V Deluxe motherboard. The case is an Antec Sonata 3 with S-Flex 1200rpm fan upgrades at the front and rear, running at about 9v.
I have an Athlon64 3500+ New Castle now, but I think it's made a bottleneck for the other components, and am wondering what the best CPU would be for for them, for what I plan to do with the system.
I'm mostly thinking about performance in games, but it seems like in this case, there's two types of games. There's games that are designed to graphically challenge people's hardware, and then there's games that look great without relying on cutting-edge hardware, and for this system, I'm only interested in the later. Games like ETQW, HL Episode 3, Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2, are designed for people who don't need to upgrade their systems just to play every game well.
Would getting an Opteron 185 or FX-60 really just be a waste of power, since the other components, like the Sapphire Radeon 3850, would then make bottlenecks? I mean, I want all components to function together at the same level the games require, without any one component being wasted. Why get a FX-60, if the video card is going to limit frame-rate to 35fps anyway. Instead, I could get an AthlonX2 4800+. I think that makes sense, right? Then again, maybe a Sapphire 3850 is good enough that even overclocking an FX-60 would get a significantly higher framerate.
I have an Athlon64 3500+ New Castle now, but I think it's made a bottleneck for the other components, and am wondering what the best CPU would be for for them, for what I plan to do with the system.
I'm mostly thinking about performance in games, but it seems like in this case, there's two types of games. There's games that are designed to graphically challenge people's hardware, and then there's games that look great without relying on cutting-edge hardware, and for this system, I'm only interested in the later. Games like ETQW, HL Episode 3, Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2, are designed for people who don't need to upgrade their systems just to play every game well.
Would getting an Opteron 185 or FX-60 really just be a waste of power, since the other components, like the Sapphire Radeon 3850, would then make bottlenecks? I mean, I want all components to function together at the same level the games require, without any one component being wasted. Why get a FX-60, if the video card is going to limit frame-rate to 35fps anyway. Instead, I could get an AthlonX2 4800+. I think that makes sense, right? Then again, maybe a Sapphire 3850 is good enough that even overclocking an FX-60 would get a significantly higher framerate.