Time To Upgrade GPU

[crashtech]

I'm excited!

 

[Face2Face]

Wise choice my friend

 

[crashtech]

With a core 2 quad I would upgrade the CPU before the gpu, and ideally both together.

I want to point out that the old Harpertown CPUs I am running (same as Yorkfield 6M) have pretty close IPC to Nehalem. Even jumping to Ivy Bridge you have to pretty much go straight for a 3770 to make it a worthwhile upgrade, and even it depends on what you are doing whether or not you will see a huge difference.

 

[Subyman]

FWIW, the Sapphire is non-reference, so no full block watercooler for it. Its hard to find a decent reference card with dual bios, non-blue pcb, and unlocked. Seems like the MSI is the only one left. I ended up purchasing a used card just to get the better quality boards that they made in the early/mid 2012's.

 

[crashtech]

I'm not into the liquid cooling thing, just wanted a card that was fully unlocked, and I think I got it...

 

[Fanatical Meat]

With a core 2 quad I would upgrade the CPU before the gpu, and ideally both together.

My Q9650 is still a beast, I've yet to have any performance issues with any game. I'm going to try ARMA 3 this evening.

 

[crashtech]

My Q9650 is still a beast, I've yet to have any performance issues with any game. I'm going to try ARMA 3 this evening.

The E5472 is like a Q9650 that is SMP enabled and with a slightly different socket, but it runs at a bus speed of 1600 like Core 2 Extreme. I have two under the hood. I think they will play well with the 7970.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

The E5472 is like a Q9650 that is SMP enabled and with a slightly different socket, but it runs at a bus speed of 1600 like Core 2 Extreme. I have two under the hood. I think they will play well with the 7970.

That was my point. Until we start seeing PS4/Xbox720 ports or 4 core machines should age quite well.
I know you technically have 8 cores but I doubt a game can use two CPU's but I could be wrong.

 

[crashtech]

That was my point. Until we start seeing PS4/Xbox720 ports or 4 core machines should age quite well.
I know you technically have 8 cores but I doubt a game can use two CPU's but I could be wrong.

I have some inconclusive data that indicate Crysis3 is faster with both CPUs installed instead of just one. It seems to me that the Crysis3 benchmarks indicate the 3770 is faster than 3570 in most instances, which indicates it can use more than just a straight quad core.