E8400 or ATI 4850 Which to upgrade first?

JRF88

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Mar 20, 2011
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I'm about to upgrade my aging desktop. Ultimately I want to have an I5 2500k and whatever happens to be the best GPU for ~350.

Right now it's within the budget to purchase a new Mobo, i5 cpu, and new ram. BUT my wife is giving me the :non: about dropping another 350-400 on a GPU.

Is the i5 Sandybridge going to stay relevant for as long everyone is making it out to be? Or will AMDs bulldozer/Llano outperform? Is buying a 6970 now and purchasing a new Mobo+CPU-RAM in a few months a bad idea or will the E8400 not bottleneck it as bad as I'm thinking.

Note: I've not overclocked anything and am not sure if any kind of OC to the E8400 will make a noticeable increase in performance.
 

mortonww

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At what resolution do you play? If you want to wait and see how Bulldozer performs, you could buy the 6970 now and be bottlenecked by your CPU but still enjoy improved performance, then just upgrade to Bulldozer if it turns out to be competitive.

How long is a few months? Have you considered the GTX 570?
 

JRF88

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I play at 1680x1050 and am reading up on the 570 as we speak, but I've always sworn by ATI :p

A few months depends on which route I go. It'd be easier to convince my wife to let me drop ~350 sooner than it would to drop ~650. If I upgrade now the most I would be looking at would be 4 months.

How much of a bottleneck are we looking at? Right now I've switched to my laptop (i7, 360m) for gaming as my desktop is really showing it's age, but I want to go back to it.
 
^+1

Hopefully AMD will stick with the price wars thing and have BD less than SB.
If I were you I would actually just upgrade the GPU (200$ for the GPU is fine) and save the 150$ for future CPU/Mobo upgrades.

By 200$ I mean the 6870 which will give you PLENTY of performance over your 4850. Overclock the E8400 to reduce the minor bottleneck and you should be set until Q3 2011. (that's when BD comes out apparently)
 
Oh I just saw your resolution, Yeah the 6870 would be plenty of firepower. The 6850 would even work at your resolution really well. You should be looking at those two cards. They'll save you the 150$ you could be spending on the CPU and motherboard later.