How is Athlon x4 630 for gaming?

[darksmart]

How is Athlon x4 630 for gaming?
My friend is building a gaming rig on budget with athlon x4 630 and 5770or 6870.
Will this athlon bottleneck the cards like 5870 or 6970 if he upgrade the card in future?
Can it maxx out gta 4 and crysis with 5770 or 6870?

 

[BaronMatrix]

How is Athlon x4 630 for gaming?
My friend is building a gaming rig on budget with athlon x4 630 and 5770or 6870.
Will this athlon bottleneck the cards like 5870 or 6970 if he upgrade the card in future?
Can it maxx out gta 4 and crysis with 5770 or 6870?

Depends on the resolution. I'd say the max for the 630 would be 1680x1050. Then you can turn up eye candy with a 6870 or so. The good thing is that if it can play CrySis it can play nearly any game.

Truthfully, I'd wait for the AM3+ boards to come out since that's an upgrade path to Bulldozer.

 

[o1die]

The 630 is ok; I was able to overclock mine slightly on a low end board by msi. Also checkout the low end phenom II's. Before ordering a board or cpu, use the "cpu support" listing on the motherboard website to see if a bios update may be required. It's impossible to tell what bios file is loaded on some boards; newegg has a pretty good turnover of boards, so some of it's popular boards may already have the latest bios file.

 

[simon12]

An athlon x 3 440, 445 or 450 would be as good or better in 9 out of 10 games and save a bit of cash. I think bottlenecks will occur with anything above a 6850 with an athlon, if you overclock maybe a 6870. If your gaming at 1920 x 1080 then to really max out crysis you need a 6970 or 2 x 6850s. GTA IV is poorly coded and needs a better CPU rather than GPU sorry I don't know what it takes to max it out. The 2 games you mention are poor examples though. See this link for the fps you can expect from a 5770 and 6850 http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/296?vs=291&i=188.192.191.194.195.238.197.200.201.203.204.206.207.210.211.213.214.216.217.219.220.221.222.223.228.232.233.231.229.230.234.235 . Instead of upgrading the card later get a board that supports crossfire at 8X/8X and get a second later.

 

[darksmart]

Actually 1920 x 1080 is not my resolution.I will be gaming at 1680 x 1050 max.

 

[darksmart]

Best answer selected by darksmart.