Will this system do fine with a Radeon 5870?

MistaPi

Regular
C2D 8500 (3,16GHz), P35 (PCIe 1.1) and 4GB PC6400 memory.

Going to play most types of games at 1920x1200, 4-8xAA and 8-16x AF.
Will this do fine a year+ down the road you think.

Or should I invest money in a Ci7 860, P55 and 4GB DDR3 memory. Or perhaps a AMD solution with Pii X4 965.
 
The performance bottleneck in that system will certainly be the CPU, especially at stock speeds.

However, at the settings you've listed your games will be almost entirely limited by the GPU.

If you've settled on a 5870, just get it and try it out. If you desire more performance, upgrade the rest of your system. Either of the other two configs you mentioned will run very well, with a slight edge going to the i7 system.
 
Should do however I dont know if PCIe v1.1 will impact perfomance over PCIe v2.00.
 
I am often CPU limited with my 3.2GHz Conroe + GTX260 at 1080p. But this is with 0-4xAA, and I'm well over 30FPS most of the time. Games include Prince of Persia, Assassin's Creed, GRID, Far Cry 2, and Crysis (though only in scenes with lots and lots of draw calls).

If you've settled on a 5870, just get it and try it out. If you desire more performance, upgrade the rest of your system. Either of the other two configs you mentioned will run very well, with a slight edge going to the i7 system.

^ Good advice.
 
Thanks for the feedback. I am going to save some money and keep my current system and just upgrade to a 5870.
I'll wait until next time to do a full system upgrade.
 
If CPU limited or in older games you can even play around with the supersampling feature, that will keep your GPU busy.
 
So my Sapphire 5870 Vapor-X is finaly on its way in the mail. :)
I also had som extra money coming my way so I decided to upgrade the CPU as well. I just put in a order for a Phenom II 965 3,4GHz 125W TDP (gonna OC it to at least 3,6GHz I hope) and a AM3 AMD 790X mobo (Asus M4A79XTD EVO).

One question, I am running Windows 7 64bit on my current system. Should I do a clean reinstall or just clean out the drivers? I am thinking play it safe and do a clean install since its a new mobo?
 
Nice card. Let us know how far that bad boy overclocks!

Your desired O.C. will be easily achieved. A friend of mine just built a computer with the same CPU and even on stock cooling was able to jump from 3.4GHz to 3.6GHz without so much as a voltage bump. Upping the multiplier through the AMD OverDrive utility was all that was necessary.

A clean install is *usually* recommended for a motherboard change, but not always necessary.
 
Should I do a clean reinstall or just clean out the drivers? I am thinking play it safe and do a clean install since its a new mobo?
I usually try and just do it without a clean install first, then if that fails I go for a clean install. Always back up everything first of course, and be prepared for the worst...but usually I get lucky and it works. :)
 
I pretty much always transplant my Windows installations onto new systems, as reinstalling everything would just take far too much of my time. This really isn't as complicated as some people make it out to be and has never presented me with any insurmountable problems, even between highly dissimilar Intel and AMD systems - and back later. In my experience, the infamous bit rot is really a non-issue as well; my systems bench with any fresh box.

Main thing you want to pay attention to is to install the driver for a standard IDE controller in your device manager before you disconnect the old system. Get it booting with AHCI disabled in the BIOS and it'll pretty much boot anywhere. For anything newer than XP it's a good to keep a PE (and Acronis disk director/true image) boot disk ready to load your registry hive and edit the mounteddevices section if necessary, however.
 
Don't even need to reset AHCI setting unless you plan on not using it in the future. I've transplanted many systems with AHCI, just remember to enable it in the bios of the new machine.

The only thing that might cause a problem is if you have RAID and the new system has a different RAID setup.

Regards,
SB
 
Got my new rig up and running and everything seems good.
I didn't reinstall Windows 7 and got the PhenomII CPU to run at 3.6GHz. The Sapphire 5870 Vapor-x gfx card is fairly moderate clocked at 900/1300.

I have tested a few games and I am very pleased with the performance of my new computer. :)

Thanks for all your input.
 
I have E8400@3.6GHz and there is no game that smokes it and the shitty ports just grind it a bit.

EDIT: Sorry to late! XD
 
I have E8400@3.6GHz and there is no game that smokes it and the shitty ports just grind it a bit.

EDIT: Sorry to late! XD

Usually on forums like this max. settings are presumed, and I guarantee your CPU is not capable of delivering playable FPS with max. settings in GTA 4 or MSFSX.
 
I have E8400@3.6GHz and there is no game that smokes it and the shitty ports just grind it a bit.

EDIT: Sorry to late! XD

quad cores are becoming important for gaming more and more. Dragon age really benfits from the third core

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,...rks-75-percent-boost-for-quad-cores/Practice/

Your e8400@ 3.6ghz is beaten badly by a standard q6600 and is smoked by the $170 q9650 by a good 13 fps min and 20 maximum. quad core at 3.6ghz offers 75% greater performance than the same speed e8400 .

Heck we see the pehnoms doing pretty darn well in these tests > EVen the phenom 2 x3 720BE is faster than your chip.

Its going to move more and more in that direction
 
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