Gaming - what to do?

[agbyrne]

Hi all,

I'm on a tight budget at the moment but I want to build a gaming pc to get away from consoles.

Im looking at AMD X4 965 or x6 1055?
I'll be getting a 6950'aswell.

Will the x4 or x6 do well in gaming?
I am wanting BF 3 on Max ( not ultra)
Will the CPU struggle or bottleneck in games?

 

[samuelspark]

What's your monitor resolution (your #1 factor) and go with the x4. There are no games out there than use 6 cores (they're just getting into the habit of 4 cores) and you can overclock a 965 so it will be better.

 

[jaguarskx]

If gaming is the primary purpose of your rig, then you might want to consider the dual core Intel Core i3-2100 CPU which is $5 cheaper than the Phenom II X4 965 BE at Newegg.com.

The core i3-2100 (3.1GHz) can beat a Phenom II X4 980 BE (3.7GHz) in games. See following for benchmarks. The only problem with the Core i3 is that you can only overclock it by 300MHz to at most 400MHz.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/362?vs=289

 

[leandrodafontoura]

I second going with any quad-core.

8GB RAM

Feel free not to get a video card at the build, but you want to add one later for sure.

 

[iam2thecrowe]

What's your monitor resolution (your #1 factor) and go with the x4. There are no games out there than use 6 cores (they're just getting into the habit of 4 cores) and you can overclock a 965 so it will be better.

the x6 does have a small advantage in some games. Crysis 2, starcraft 2 and Dragon age origins, and a few others, make a small amount of use from its extra cores http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/88?vs=146

 

[agbyrne]

Will be 21.5 inch @ 1080P