Jon1984 wrote:You won't notice much of a difference in BF3 by overclocking you CPU.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/battlefield-3-graphics-performance,3063-13.htmlThere are good reviews on the Termaltake Frio cooler. You might want to check the Noctua coolers, pricy but one of the best for sure
A small list of some excellent coolers, providing very low temps on full load compared to most coolers:
Antec Kühler H2O 620
Zalman CNPS12x
Prolimatech Black Megahalems
Thermaltake Frio Advanced
Noctua NH-C14
I seen that review before, however the counter agrument I got from BF3 Gamer on Symthic.com is that because the 64player matches & higher level destruction in multiplayer(espically Back to Karkand Maps), CPU will have to work a lot harder than it does in SinglePlayer Campaign(Going Hunting was used to benchmark @Toms) ,here is the full quote:
Sadly "BF3 is still a GPU intensive program. Like with most games." is an all too common misperception about a lot of games. Nvidia and ATI love when you say that too. Unfortunately the truth is that Bf3 is bottled by CPU rather than GPU. The GPU mainly benefits all the graphic effects stuff. AA, ultra settings etc. However in multiplayer its all the calculations from 64 players plus the geometry of all the destructible stuff that kills your frames via cpu. Should you doubt this you can take the Sharqi TV tower test: Climb to the roof and look out at the playing field. Type render.drawfps 1 and then render.drawperfoverlayvisible 1 into console (`) Look around until you find the point at which your fps consistently drops to the lowest. You'll notice that you happen to have a lot of destructible buildings in view and that your CPU will be stressing on the perf overlay.
You can also see drastic increases/decreases by playing with the Mesh settings. This effects draw distance and mesh complexity. On Karkand maps you will see a drastic difference in fps from low to ultra. ( I said earlier to drop the Mesh to low but medium is actually better since your draw distance is maxed at medium. any further increase just effects the details and draw distance of buildings but at the cost of huge fps) As far as ghz goes, Riesig is right when he says the its not a good indicator but only when comparing different architectures (amd vs intel) When comparing within Intel chips there is a huge difference between a chip at 3ghz and one at 5. Remember that we don't care about average fps but rather minimums (how far it dips) and to test this you can go to Sharqi tower and look at the fps you get with a 3ghz vs a 5ghz. Difference is very significant.
Of interest as well is the perfoverlay graph. One yellow line and one green. Yellow is cpu and Green Gpu. Whatever line is higher is the one that's bottlenecking your system. A good rule to remember is that clock cycles do the work. So if you have a choice between a better graphics card or CPU always take the CPU. I run SLI 680's and the benefit you get from adding that card is significant but its only about 20-25% more and not 100% like logic would dictate. Now if I want to run around with everything on ultra they certainly help but then you're introducing all this extras that just confuse the scene even more which is not desirable in an multiplayer fps.
@Santewi Yeah Post is FXAA. Textures at ultra is fine but then you're losing frames for a very small benefit in pic quality over high. Only a few frames but every one counts so I would stick with high. Mesh on high/ultra is a big big no no. Huge hit in fps especially on karkand maps. No tangible benefits as draw distance for enemies is maxed at medium. The only thing that changes is details on units/buildings and building draw distance.
p.s I got quite a few recommendations for CoolerMaster Hyper Evo 212 or 212+, seem like they are adequate enough for Moderate(around 4 GHz) OC,but I will look through the other cooler you guys listed.
p.s.2 sorry about asking the same question as my main build discussion post in Systems, I will move that post toward discuss Mobo/Ram/Monitor instead.