Radeon 7870 good for me?

[Leenffc]

I have a pentium D 945 PU and looking to buy a radeon 7870 graphics card? Would this be good enough to run high end games? Like battlefield 3 / dayZ / crisis ? Open to recommendations too

 

[Supernova1138]

You are going to hit a huge CPU bottleneck pairing a 7870 with any Pentium D. Pentium Ds are very, very slow CPUs by today's standards, honestly, anything higher than a Radeon HD 7750 is likely to be held back by your CPU. It is probably time to look at a new CPU/Mobo/RAM combo, or at the very least a new CPU. If your motherboard supports a fast Core 2 Duo or the Core 2 Quads, that might be a cheap upgrade option for you. As for the 7870, there is little sense in buying it unless you get a much faster CPU, you'll be lucky to get 50% usage out of the card when using it with a Pentium D. Battlefield 3 and DayZ can also be rather CPU heavy, so that further exacerbates the problem.

Depending on what your old graphics card is, your best option may be to split your budget, and spend some money on a CPU upgrade, and the rest on a lower end graphics card.

 

[Leenffc]

Hi, this is the best CPU i can get in my motherboard as i have a pretty old pc that i got cheap, so you are reccomending HD 7750?
thanks for the reply.

 

[Supernova1138]

I'd say only spend extra on the 7870 if you plan on doing an overhaul of your system in the foreseeable future, only then would you actually see a benefit in spending that much money on a video card. If you plan to keep your current setup for a while longer, don't bother aiming much higher than the 7750, and don't expect great performance in your games, Pentium Ds are only at best barely adequate for some games these days.

 

[Leenffc]

Hi, Thanks for the reply, im now looking to build this new system and wondering if this would be enough to play games such as BF3? DayZ, Crysis? if so how well will it run?

Specs:

Mobo: MSI H61M-P31 (G3)
GPU: 1GB XFX Radeon HD 7770
CPU: Phenom II x4 965
RAM: 2x INTEGRAL IN3T4GNZ PC3-10600 DDR3 PC Memory - 4 GB DIMM RAM

Im also open to recomendations? Thanks

 

[Leenffc]

budget is about £150-200

 

[Leenffc]

i have changed decision on cpu as the quad core dosent have correct socket for mobo, i have changed to Intel Pentium G860? is this a good idea? or best looking at better mobo and staying wth old cpu?