Will my GPU be bottlenecked by my CPU?

[imanoob93]

I have the ATI Sapphire 5670 ddr5 512mb GPU and I am planning to get the AMD Athlon II X4 640 CPU. Will this beast of a cpu bottleneck my video card? And if it does, can't I just run the 5670 in crossfire to compensate for the cpu?



Thanks guys

 

[loneninja]

If an Athlon II X4 bottlenecked your GPU, running a 2nd one in crossfire would only further create a larger bottleneck, not fix it.

You didn't bother to mention your resolution, but a 5670 is honestly weak enough that even low res gaming the Athlon II should keep up just fine. If your gaming at 1680x1050+ than I can say for sure the 5670 will actually be your weak link in games.

 

[imanoob93]

Oh ok. I thought the 5670 was a pretty decent card?

 

[Herr_Koos]

Benchmarks are your friend:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts/2010-gaming-graphics-charts-high-quality/Percent-normalized,2394.html

The 5670 is more or less on par with a GeForce 9800GT, if that helps.

The X4 640 is powerful enough to handle much faster cards than that.

 

[hell_storm2004]

The X4 640 wont be bottlenecked by HD5770x2. I am pretty sure of it. The proccy is pretty decent if you ask me.

 

[dEAne]

You like to get an X4 640 or crossfire your 5670 - I would advice you to sell your 5670, X4 640 is a good cpu and a powerful one too.

 

[imanoob93]

Ok, cool. Another question. I have g skill ddr2 ram. Since it's ddr2 ram will it perform badly with the cpu?

 

[g00fysmiley]

while ddr3 is indeed faster than ddr2 you'd have to replace the mobo as well to utilize it... that said while it is faster its not THAT faster such that you'd notice

 

[Herr_Koos]

It depends. Are you planning to buy an AM3 board, or use the Athlon X4 with your existing board?

If you buy AM3, you need to get DDR3 to go with it. DDR2 won't work in an AM3 board.

 

[iam2thecrowe]

I dont think you understand what a bottleneck is...Think of this in terms of BEER. If you have your athlon II (standard beer bottle) and your 5670 (funnel) adding another 5670(funnel) is not going to get the beer out of the Athlon (beer bottle) any faster. But, if you had a core i7 (fire hose of beer) into 1 5670 (funnel), the funnel will overflow and beer (data) will not go through it fast enough and the funnel will be the limiting factor ("botleneck") Increasing the size of that funnel at that stage would make sense (adding another 5670). As an exception you could also say as you make the screen resolution higher, the "funnel" gets smaller. At higher resolutions more GFX card power is needed. Hope that clears things up...