After reading alot of the reviews on the 9800GTX, several of them said you could get more performance out of a highly oceed cpu, no matter what it is. So, for practicle reasons the answer is yes IF theres a certain game that itll help in. But mostly, this card is fine without uber ocing/cpu. The cpus arent getting the max outta these cards, no matter what you do. But like I said, its only a few situations that its really practical, Crysis being one of the games