Phenom ii x4 955 or 1055t for gaming

goalguy876

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May 29, 2010
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Im building a new PC and im spending about $700. If the hexacore processor isnt going to make much of a difference for gaming i would like to keep the extra money. But if it makes a big difference, Ill go ahead and spend more.
 

goalguy876

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May 29, 2010
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My card isnt going to be any better then that so should I get the Athlon x3 or maybe the Athlon x4?
I plan on overclocking by the way... any video card reccomendations would also be appreciated :)
 
Video card depends on what you intend to do. Like, what games? If mostly older, you could save money on the card.

In general though I recommend the most expensive Radeon 5xxx card you can afford with the 5670 as a minimum.

Also, just make sure you are not playing FSX. That is one of the rare games that will utilize the CPU more than the GPU.

I have an Athlon IIx4 at 3.25GHz. Currently most games use no more than 3 CPU cores. This could of course change in the future. I say though, buy for the now. Because really, saving $200 on the CPU now, in 2 years you could get something significantly better for that extra money.

I think, for example, An Athlon IIx3 3.0GHz system with 4GB DDR2 or DDR3 memory and a radeon 5770 would make for a great system.
 

That's reasonable. I have a radeon 3870 with my athlonx4. I can play crysis on medium at 1920x1080. The only game that I accept less than 60FPS for regular gameplay. The 3870 performs between the 4670 and the 5670.

Video memory can make a difference in much newer games. Or badly encoded games. Like GTAIV that should have 1GB of memory to run higher than medium settings. The memory requirements are always increasing though. If you want to go for 512MB of 1024MB depends on how long you intend to keep the card.

The Athlon IIs are the budget models. None have unlocked multipliers. They lack the L3 cache and this is the only difference between them and the phenom IIs. I overclock with the base clock and have gotten a 25% overclock, stable without a voltage increase on my 620.