HD5870 and HD5850 Reviews

[DilTech]

So many people on here always seem to forget that Light...

From personal experience, I can say the Q6600 as low as 3.2ghz, or a phenom at 3.2-3.6 play games perfectly fine. Sure, I'm not playing with a 5870, but fact is if you want an idea of if the cpu will bottleneck you too far drop the resolution as far as it will possibly go with no AA/AF and see if the framerate is to low for you... If it's not, then your cpu isn't going to hold you back.

That is, assuming you have a card that can reach your cpu's limit of course... Obviously if you're trying crysis and you have an HD2900 you're still not going anywhere near what your cpu is capable of.

According to testing with the GTX 295 and cpu scaling, the only game that scaled more than like 2-4 fps at high resolution was UT3, and it was STILL over 100fps on all the quads IIRC. Only the old school A64x2's had issues staying when it came to this.