Is an Athlon II X4 640 be good for gaming?

[xpeh]

I'd like to max games like Battlefield 3 and Skyrim. Would a Athlon II x4 640 bottleneck a cards like the 6870 or the GTX 560 Ti?

 

[esrever]

It will bottleneck those cards a little and will not max those 2 games.

 

[Uther39]

What mobo are you using it on?

 

[xpeh]

This motherboard: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138283

I'm looking to build a cheaper system and I found a new Athlon II X4 640 for 65 dollars. If this CPU is bad, are there any AMD CPU's under 75 dollars that are good for maxing games without a bottleneck?

 

[Uther39]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130632

Invest $30 extra in this MSI then you will be able to OC your Athlon at the simple flick of a switch on the mobo which will result in a 20% (3.4 - 3.6ghz)OC, which means you wont bottlekneck anything up to a 6950.

If you do this you will also need to buy a Hyper 212+ CPU cooler $30 to keep everything nice and cool, its easy and its worth it, plus the MSI board will give you an upgrade path.

 

[Uther39]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130630

Or this one which is the same as your price range if you must have micro atx. But it still offers the easy OC and the upgrade path.

 

[Uther39]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835103065

Thats the cooler you need.

Sorry should of put it in all one post but trying to feed my baby. haha.

 

[xpeh]

Oh okay. I have a budget of 420 dollars. I need to buy a mobo, psu, gpu, cpu, and a case. So I'm on a pretty tight budget. I need each component to be around 50 dollars. I'll spend 140 on a Sapphire 6850.

 

[amuffin]

You also need an os!

 

[xpeh]

I already have a windows 7 retail disk.

 

[amuffin]

What about a sandybridge pentium g620 cpu?

 

[kinggraves]

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/122?vs=406

65 dollars seems like a good price for a x4 640.

I dunno if you'll be maxing BF3 on that budget at any cost, what's the resolution?

 

[xpeh]

I'm looking for AMD CPU's. They have pretty attractive prices, and AM3 motherboards are pretty cheap, too. A resolution of 1920X1080. 1080i

 

[amuffin]

The pentium g620 is 70 dollars. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116399 and an h61 board will cost you 50-70 dollars.

 

[xpeh]

Is that processor significantly better than the Athlon ii X4 640?

 

[amuffin]

Yes and it uses less power than the athlon so you won't have to get an as high psu, check the link that kinggraves put.

 

[amuffin]

Is that processor significantly better than the Athlon ii X4 640?

It also uses socket 1155 which can later be upgraded to an i7-2600k or i7-3770k if you have the money :0

 

[xpeh]

I'm still trying to spend under 420 dollars. I think that cpu would go over my budget

 

[amuffin]

It is 5 dollars over the price of an athlon.

 

[xpeh]

whoops. Didn't pay attenton to that. Can you post a good motherboard that will work with that cpu that's under 60?

 

[amuffin]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130603
OR
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157241
Though I recommend this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131787

 

[xpeh]

From what I calculated, I'll spend under 420 dollars, and that's all of of newegg. Would there be any bottleneck on the g620? I'm looking to max most games and possibly run some high resource applications.

 

[amuffin]

No bottlenecking.

 

[xpeh]

Would the processor be good for encoding a 480i Divx file to mp4?

 

[esrever]

like I said, you won't be maxing all your games.

Its not just the cpu either, the 6870 and the 560 ti just aren't powerful enough to max bf3. Skyrim maybe.

The athlon might give you more performance as bf3 likes more cores than the g620 has.