Will my CPU bottleneck a GTX 670?

[paradoxeternal]

Hi guys, so i've been jumping around on what i'm going to do to upgrade my GPU this year and with the 670 comes out it seems the perfect fit for price/power for me. However, i want to make sure my CPU, an AMD PHENOM II x6 won't bottleneck it. I know, i know, it's a pretty weak CPU (was a noob when i first put my rig together a year ago) but i've overclocked it by 500 mhz to make it a bit more powerful.

Do any of you think it will be a bottleneck in terms of performance from a 670? or should it get the job done?

 

[Raidur]

My first question is... why aren't you going for 6870 crossfire?

In very fast motion games (such as CSS) I can tell the difference between 90FPS and 300FPS.

This argument is so dry my eyes are crusting. Sick of hearing the "eyes" and "refresh rate" argument.

I will agree though, you should be playable on any game on just about any settings with a Thuban (for now).

You'll be fine. Don't bother changing platforms until you need GTX 670 SLI to be playable on settings you prefer, or you start a very CPU bound game 3.8ghz Thuban can't keep up with.

 

[eddieroolz]

I love how people say their reaction time is 0.011 seconds or better and 0.016 seconds is just way too slow. (thats 90 fps and 60 fps)

I didn't claim my reaction time was 0.011 seconds, but there's a noticeable difference when I play on my laptop monitor (1366x768) that gets 120FPS consistently and my 1080p monitor that occasionally dips into 40FPS. In the latter, I do noticeably worse.

Do keep in mind that not all people are the same...you may not notice a difference, but the eye can definitely see more than 24FPS and I take every advantage of that. So do a lot of other people too, hence the reason for 120Hz monitor and TVs.

 

[ohyouknow]

It's fine. The more you worry about it the more you'll think its there. Game on.

 

[proxy711]

when you move camera, you've change all scene, different load, different light, and different object polygon, which is give a huge load to the memory, processor, gpu and graphics memory.

this change make graphics card cannot maintain framerate stability and will give less than 4.166 frame/ms. that's why you'll see some lagging..

I'm not talking about fast 180 degree turns being laggy. I mean slow movements being smoother at higher FPS then 24. You can test this pretty easily. Set a fps limiter to 24 fps in a game you have no problems playing like HL2 walk around looking around then up the limiter to 60fps. Looks much better. See below quote for another example.

are you sure..?
because i think this is just marketing gimmick to sell expensive 120hz monitor rather than cheap 60hz..
)

Heres a quote from Anandtech's review of an Asus 120hz monitor http://www.anandtech.com/show/3842/asus-vg236h-review-our-first-look-at-120hz

"Though the 120Hz refresh frequency does make games playable in 3D, there’s another important benefit of using a faster refresh rate - everything looks smoother, and you can now drive up to 120 FPS without tearing. The ASUS VG236H was my first exposure to 120Hz refresh displays that aren’t CRTs, and the difference is about as subtle as a dump truck driving through your living room. I spent the first half hour seriously just dragging windows back and forth across the desktop - from a 120Hz display to a 60Hz, stunned at how smooth and different 120Hz was. Yeah, it’s that different."

Not a marketing gimmick and another example of how seeing no more then 24FPS is complete bull.

 

[paradoxeternal]

wow guys... i just realized i had responses to this... tom's never sent me emails about responses until earlier today when it told me i had a bunch..

it seems the majority of you are saying that i should just go for it. i think i will do this, and upgrade my CPU in january when i have more money (from what i understand haswell or the next gen intels will only be quad core) so i'll probably just upgrade to an i7-2600k or 3770k.

the only issue now is waiting fo newegg to get that sweet Gigabyte 670 with the three fans in stock... can't beat that for $400...

as for the entire eye movement thing, i haven't seen too much about the argument before but i'm pretty sure i can tell 25 fps from 60, or even 60 from 90. even if i can't see a difference, i can definitely FEEL it.

thanks for your help!

 

[paradoxeternal]

My first question is... why aren't you going for 6870 crossfire?

In very fast motion games (such as CSS) I can tell the difference between 90FPS and 300FPS.

This argument is so dry my eyes are crusting. Sick of hearing the "eyes" and "refresh rate" argument.

I will agree though, you should be playable on any game on just about any settings with a Thuban (for now).

You'll be fine. Don't bother changing platforms until you need GTX 670 SLI to be playable on settings you prefer, or you start a very CPU bound game 3.8ghz Thuban can't keep up with.

I'm thinking about doing xfire 6870s but my room can get a bit warm during the summer and two GPUs might generate too much heat. also i think i only have enough pci-e 6 pin connectors for one GPU, but i might be mistaken.