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Hi all,

I'm planning to finally upgrade my trustworthy Radeon 4870 to a Radeon 7870. My question is: will my CPU become a bottleneck, in a way that I wouldn't get the most out of this card? My CPU is an AMD Phenom II X4 965.

The other problem I may have is I only have 4Gb of RAM. The thing is that my older mobo uses DDR2 memory, and I can't find a decently priced 8Gb kit from a reliable source. Could that also be a bottleneck, both for speed and size?

Or one could say... upgrade mobo+CPU+RAM before the video card? I'm ready to spend on that VGA, but not sure about the mobo+CPU+RAM as that will be close to twice the price. And so of course, definitely not ready to upgrade everything.

Thanks.

Hey, thanks for your reply.

I do have 4 slots for ram. However, they are currently filled with four 1Gb sticks... I guess those could be sold as well, as anyone not doing gaming might be looking for DDR2 upgrades to their older system...

CPU bottleneck Question - Your CPU will do just fine (for an AMD). A little overclock (to 3.7GHz) and you could have that thing purring along just like an x4 980. If not, its fine the way it is too.

RAM Question - Having more RAM never hurts, but what's good for the goose is good for the gander. (TR only uses 4GB in their Econobox build)

Everything is a bottleneck at some point;

Right now, your 4870 is a huge bottleneck. When you change to a 7870 your processor will be a bottleneck.
However, the difference between the 4870 running at its best, and 7870 only running at 80% because of the old processor is still going to be stupendous.

I run a 7850 with an old Core2 and I know it's holding the machine back from time to time. At one point that machine was running a 9600GT and if I hadn't upgraded the video card (despite the bottlenecking) I wouldn't have been able to run many of the games that run perfectly on my 7850.

Extra RAM and an overclock would help a bit though. If you're not planning on a CPU/RAM/Motherboard upgrade in the next year or so, maybe get yourself a 7850 instead of a 7870 and use the change to get a half-decent tower cooler for your X4 if you're still using the supplied AMD one. Coolermaster's Hyper 212 EVO is a pretty good deal for around $30 and you can transplant it to Haswell or socket FM2 in the future.

I've always run CPU-limited when I had to choose. The GPU can always take on additional work, via aniso, AA, etc. An under-loaded CPU just runs cooler.

VGA upgrade - potential bottlenecks?

Reading the title, my first thought was: "Man, he'll be so happy with SVGA but he really ought to upgrade right to XGA or better!"

Lol yeah maybe not the best term I used there...

In this day and age, don't settle for anything less than FHD.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_d ... resolution

Wiki article wrote:

Video Graphics Array
QVGA (320×240), VGA (640×480), SVGA (800×600)

Extended Graphics Array
XGA (1024×768), WXGA (1280×768), XGA+ (1152×864), WXGA+ (1440×900), SXGA (1280×1024), WSXGA+ (1680×1050), UXGA (1600×1200), WUXGA (1920×1200)

Quad Extended Graphics Array
WQXGA (2560×1600), WQUXGA (3840×2400)

Hyper Extended Graphics Array
WHXGA (5120×3200), WHSXGA (6400×4096), WHUXGA (7680×4800)

High-Definition
HD (1280×720), FHD (1920×1080), QHD (2560×1440), WQXGA+ (3200x1800), UHD (4K) (3840×2160), UHD (8K) (7680×4320)

vince wrote:

Hi all,

I'm planning to finally upgrade my trustworthy Radeon 4870 to a Radeon 7870. My question is: will my CPU become a bottleneck, in a way that I wouldn't get the most out of this card? My CPU is an AMD Phenom II X4 965.

The other problem I may have is I only have 4Gb of RAM. The thing is that my older mobo uses DDR2 memory, and I can't find a decently priced 8Gb kit from a reliable source. Could that also be a bottleneck, both for speed and size?

Or one could say... upgrade mobo+CPU+RAM before the video card? I'm ready to spend on that VGA, but not sure about the mobo+CPU+RAM as that will be close to twice the price. And so of course, definitely not ready to upgrade everything.

Thanks.

I don't think your CPU will be a major bottleneck for a 7870. Take a look at this nice comparison Tom's recently published: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gam ... 427-9.html

With most newer games taking advantage of quad-cores, the old phenom II architecture holds up pretty well in these games. Tom's even picks your x4 965 CPU as their current budget gaming CPU of choice at the $100 mark (essentially gives you the same gaming potential as an ivy bridge core i3 in most new games that are multi-threaded). Again, don't take my word for it, but the read the link above.

Cheers!

Nice to know.

I went ahead and bought the Video Card. Mega bonus, I got four game keys (Bioshock Infinite, Tomb Raider, Far Cry Blood Dragon, and Crysis 3!!).

Runs much quieter and cooler than my previous 4870 to boot. I'll try some games tomorrow.

Cheers all, and thanks for your input!