I7 960 ok for a couple to five years?

[Cuzzin Chizzy]

So, I've been obsessing over buying a new motherboard, cpu, and ram.

I have

ASUS RAMPAGE III Formula
Intel i7 960 @ 3.2
Corsair Dominator 12GB
EVGA GTX 670 FTW

Just built my system last year and because I was in a hurry(my next build will be much better researched) I got a 960 setup instead of a 2600k.

What I want to know is with my current setup how long will I be good for @ 1080p 60fps maxed? Should I just say screw it and buy a z77 board and new cpu, RAM?

I just know that when some of the newer games come out, if my setup doesn't run them at 60 fps at least then it'll annoy the crap out of me. I'm worried that 670 ftw sli in the future would be bottlenecked by my x58 setup.

 

[willard]

It's pretty unlikely that in the next five years CPU requirements in games will spike. Right now, pretty much any quad core chip is enough for games. There are a few exceptions, but they're rare.

For the most part, the video card is all that matters for your gaming performance.

 

[eggbrook]

Your CPU is not work upgrading, nor is your ram because I doubt you'll use all that ram you have right now anyway. What you could do is buy a nice CPU cooler and maybe overclock the CPU (I do not know if the i7 960 is a decent overclocker I've only owned a 920 which overclocked well), otherwise your system is fine. Save your money for another two years or so and build a really nice pc when the hardware has really changed.

 

[willard]

On the topic of overclocking, I think the 960 will do around 4 GHz with a decent cooler. Seems like 3.8 GHz is a good "easy" target that almost any chip will hit, and over 4 GHz looks to take more serious cooling and some luck.

 

[lilotimz]

My i7-920 easily reaches 4.2ghz with my CM212+ hyper but i usually keep it at 3.6ghz because it really doesnt matter for gaming. Our i7s are still superior to nearly all the AMD processors in gaming and has about 10%-15% less performance compared to Sandy Bridge / Ivy bridge processors.

This processing power is irrelevant because the bottleneck are the actual games AND the gpus. Try to list more than 10 games that can utilize quad cores efficiently...

Anyways. I bought my 920 in 2009, kept it stock till earlier this year. Running at 3.6ghz and am only planning to replace my gtx 260 when i have the money. PLanning to run this for another 4 years then relegating it to secondary computer duty.

 

[Cuzzin Chizzy]

Best answer selected by Cuzzin Chizzy.

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by MouseMonkey