Quote Originally Posted by STaRGaZeR View Post
Read my previous posts. A 5850 is not the bottleneck at 1680x1050+AA in most games except some uber new, bad optimized console ports. FEAR, TF2, Trackmania, Assassin's Creed, GRID to name a few, they all suffer the same issue: the CPU dictates minFPS. All of them improved a lot with the C2Q-->i5 change, same clocks.
I dunno man, that's just not lining up with my experience. My video card actually is a 5850, and my CPU is currently a PhII clocked at 3.6Ghz. I play games either on my 22" LCD (1680x1050) or sometimes I like to hook it up to my 50" plasma (1920x1080). Most games I play such as TF2, BFBC2, L4D2 and other random games don't see a benefit when I overclock my CPU on either resolution. In fact TF2 for example, which is a CPU limited game, I was curious and downclocked to 2.8Ghz/1.1v (was on a power consumption kick that day, random goals come and go lol) and had basically the same frame rates as I did at 3.6Ghz. This is on my 5850 8xAA/16xAF at 1920x1080.

Sorry I am not trying to de-rail the thread I'm just pitching in my own experience so I will stop with this post. I don't have a brand loyalty to AMD (though I am sure the last few years purchases could make that a curious claim lol) and I am fortunate enough to say that if I NEEDED an i7 for games I could afford such a system without worrying. But really, to play games it seemed like an i7 system was much more than necessary to get the experience, and with my current setup and my gaming experience, I feel I was correct when thinking so