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Hi guy's first post, just wondering if any of you gaming nuts out there could offer me some advice.

Basically i am wanting to build a rig that will play BF3 at high (not ultra) and @ 1080p, i would also never like the fps to drop below say 45 - 50.

The main part's that i first had picked out were the gtx 570 and the amd phenom x4 965, and these are the parts i am looking for some advice on, basically what i am wanting to know is if the phenom ii x4 will bottle neck the gtx 570 running bf3 at high (not ultra) and @ 1080p.

I have heard some stories and read until my eyes have bled about performance stats regarding different cpu's and bf3, and tbh i don't generally post in forums asking questions as i have a fairly good idea of what works and what does not but i have been out of the hardware loop for a couple of years now due to university and stuff so yea...

So if the x4 aint gona cut it what else would you guys suggest that will run but @ the fps and settings i mentioned above for the cheapest possible price.

If some one says just get an i5 2500k i will phisicaly explode because 60% of replys to forum posts i have read had this in it some where. i5 for me right now is to expensive... also i am not a fan boy i have used both amd and intel in the past both great companies and great cpu's, though i have not used ant ati/amd gpu's have always went nvidia that way,i just think there driver support is better, thats all, and from what i have seen pound for pound they are the best price wise.

- Anton.

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What kind of motherboard do you have? That combo will work just fine, and won't cause any bottlenecking. But there may be better options for just a bit more money. With the gtx 570 you will have no problem playing on ultra, I can max out the settings on my 560ti with a bit of overclocking. So you might be better off going one step down with the graphics card, and going one step up with the processor.

Edit: Also, could you link to the specific gtx 570 that you have picked out? The prices vary a good amount, and I can be of a better help if I knew which one specifically you were looking at.

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I am running an AMD fx-4100 quad core, overclocked to 4.3ghz on stock cooling. If your motherboard supports it, its only $10 dollars more than the one you had picked out, and will bring you up to date with AMDs processor line. I made my build similar to the one you had picked out, and for the same reasons, as I was on a budget. The 560 ti is a good option for the money, and with a bit of overclocking will get you around 570 levels.

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What's your budget and where do you live? Information like that will help us to help you. Battlefield 3 is not a CPU-intensive game so you're better off investing more in the video card than the CPU. With a GeForce GTX 570, you should expect 50 to 60 FPS on high settings (and 40 to 50 FPS on ultra with AA enabled).

Here are some videos of Battlefield 3 running with the same specs:

Also, you somehow managed to create 9 additional threads. I deleted them fairly quickly but I must say, I'm surprised you were able to do that.

2nal2yr.png

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I would recommend sticking with the 570 since it has 1.2GB of vRAM as opposed to 1GB for the 560 Ti. It will definitely help at the 1080 resolution.

As long as you don't have AA on, you should be perfectly fine with that CPU and GPU.

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Battlefield 3 is not a CPU-intensive game so you're better off investing more in the video card than the CPU.

That's actually not true. Compared to almost every other game out there, BF3 is very very CPU intensive. If you don't have a modern quad core, BF3 will run really poorly. But in this case, the Phenom 965 is good enough and will perform well.

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I would recommend sticking with the 570 since it has 1.2GB of vRAM as opposed to 1GB for the 560 Ti. It will definitely help at the 1080 resolution.

As long as you don't have AA on, you should be perfectly fine with that CPU and GPU.

Unless someone is running 1920x1080 on a HDTV or something I don't see the point in enabling AA either way.

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That's actually not true. Compared to almost every other game out there, BF3 is very very CPU intensive. If you don't have a modern quad core, BF3 will run really poorly. But in this case, the Phenom 965 is good enough and will perform well.

CPU_02.png

http://www.techspot....ance/page7.html

On the CPU side of things, we found that Battlefield 3 is not nearly as CPU demanding as many have made it out to be. Previously tested games, such as Hard Reset, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, The Witcher 2 and Crysis 2, saw a massive difference in performance between dual and quad-core processors. For example, in Deus Ex dual-cores were 43% slower than their quad-core counterparts. Battlefield 3 on the other hand delivered similar frame rates with a decent dual-core as it did with a quad.

http://www.techspot....ance/page8.html

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Hey guy's thanks for all the reply's must say never been on a forum before were i have had that many replays that quickly.

@ Anaron I live in Scotland and my budget for rig excluding the ips monitor i mentioned is about 350 400max i already have a case, might need to get a psu right now i am running a 550w i believe.

Cheers for all the reply's.

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Hey guy's thanks for all the reply's must say never been on a forum before were i have had that many replays that quickly.

@ Anaron I live in Scotland and my budget for rig excluding the ips monitor i mentioned is about 350 400max i already have a case, might need to get a psu right now i am running a 550w i believe.

Cheers for all the reply's.

In my experience 550w is normally plenty for single GPU setups, could save yourself money there.

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Just out of curiosity why not get a 660Ti? I just recently got one and BF3 on High at 1920*1080 gets anywhere between 50-80 FPS depending on how crazy things get. Plus from my understanding the 600 series have improvements all around from the 500 series, power consumption being one of the larger selling points.

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Even a low end i5 will blow away that AMD phenom. If you want to play BF3 at 1080p you will need a decent CPU. The variances are not as large as with other games, but a decent CPU is still an important part of a gaming build.

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Even a low end i5 will blow away that AMD phenom. If you want to play BF3 at 1080p you will need a decent CPU. The variances are not as large as with other games, but a decent CPU is still an important part of a gaming build.

You don't need an expensive CPU for Battlefield 3. The higher the resolution, the less important the CPU becomes. And Battlefield 3 isn't CPU-intensive to begin with. Take a look at this:

CPU_03.png

http://www.techspot....ance/page7.html

And this:

Battlefield 3 CPU Performance

As well as testing a variety of cards on BF3's Frostbite 2 engine, we also wanted to investigate the effect of CPU clock speeds, the number of CPU cores and the effect of Hyper-Threading. Would an overclocked CPU help? Or could an ageing dual-core chip limp along? We under-clocked our Intel i7 965 CPU, as well as disabling two of its cores and Hyper-Threading, in order to find out. The results were surprising.

fut7wh.png

It didn't matter whether the CPU was running at 3.2GHz, 3GHz or even 2GHz; our benchmarks returned the same results. Even when we dropped the CPU down from four cores to only two, the in-game frame rates proved annoyingly stubborn. While BF3 will load itself across all four CPU cores when presented with a quad-core CPU, it seems to have little benefit when it comes to performance, running just as well with much lower clock speeds, or on a dual-core CPU.

[...]

We also repeated the test by running our benchmark with 6GB, 4GB and even 2GB of DDR3 memory fitted into the system. Again, we found that performance remained stoically unchanged; only a single-core setup saw any difference, when the game flat-out refused to run at all. Needless to say, then, that BF3 appears to not be the most CPU-taxing game, instead relying almost entirely on the performance of the graphics card.

http://www.bit-tech....ical-analysis/7

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Even a low end i5 will blow away that AMD phenom. If you want to play BF3 at 1080p you will need a decent CPU. The variances are not as large as with other games, but a decent CPU is still an important part of a gaming build.

Hey thanks, yea i was looking at getting a lga 1156 cpu but the motherboards are like gold dust now.

http://teksyndicate....st-pc-under-700

I'll just leave this here.

Cheers for that, hey is that Logan from tech update!!!! didn't know he had his own different show.

Just out of curiosity why not get a 660Ti? I just recently got one and BF3 on High at 1920*1080 gets anywhere between 50-80 FPS depending on how crazy things get. Plus from my understanding the 600 series have improvements all around from the 500 series, power consumption being one of the larger selling points.

I would if i could man but i think that will just put me over my budget, believe me i would have an asus mars II if i could lol. thanks for the reply any way though.

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Id personally go for the i5, you can get a 4gb bundle for ?233 or a 8gb bundle for ?247 meaning you have ?100-150 for your gfx card and this is coming from someone thats brought AMD processors for over ten years and im converting...

Reason for doing this?

The extra cpu power will be noticeable imo plus what i find is when i play onlne games i decide i want to record and maybe upload them, if not to upload just to play back and see what i coud of done better this is where the extra power comes in handy imo, plus you can never predict when your computer is going to go crazy and that cpu lag could eb what kills you *RAAAAGE!!!!* thats my opinion anyway. Btw there are some bundles cheaper, but they are not the 2500k cpu which i would personally go for.

Here are the two bundles:

4gb mother board cpu

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Intel-Core-I5-2500K-3-3Ghz-4GB-DDR3-1333mhz-Gigabyte-H61M-Motherboard-Bundle-/170789270126?pt=UK_Motherboards_CPUs&hash=item27c3d5726e

8gb motherboard cpu

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Intel-Core-I5-2500K-3-3Ghz-8GB-DDR3-1333mhz-Gigabyte-H61M-Motherboard-Bundle-/170789270072?pt=UK_Motherboards_CPUs&hash=item27c3d57238

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Thank's for the reply but yea, the i5 would be a good option if i wanted to future proof my system but all i am really wanting is not bottle necks cpu with the 560ti or 570 at the least possible price, again i plan on running bf3 @ 1080p, high detail (not ultra) and would like to get a min of 45 ish fps.

But thanks any way its always an option didn't release i could get an i5 combo that cheap tbh.

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Thank's for the reply but yea, the i5 would be a good option if i wanted to future proof my system but all i am really wanting is not bottle necks cpu with the 560ti or 570 at the least possible price, again i plan on running bf3 @ 1080p, high detail (not ultra) and would like to get a min of 45 ish fps.

But thanks any way its always an option didn't release i could get an i5 combo that cheap tbh.

Hey, could I get an absolute price limit from you? I could possibly construct you a mid range system with an i5 and 7870 for under 850$ with *quality parts*.

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Hey, could I get an absolute price limit from you? I could possibly construct you a mid range system with an i5 and 7870 for under 850$ with *quality parts*.

His price range is ?350-400, the bundle i have posted earlier is the best deal he will get imo that will leave ?100-150 for a gfx card but he does not seem interested in it. Id personally get a better cpu then upgrade the gfx when i could seeing as the cpu would generally get used more as its used out of gaming, also as he posted himself he is future proofing which is saving him money. I use a PC alot and feel that skimping on the most important part is a bad idea.

Source: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

AMD Phenom II X4 B65

4,945

Intel Core i5-2500K @ 3.30GHz

6,593

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I would if i could man but i think that will just put me over my budget, believe me i would have an asus mars II if i could lol. thanks for the reply any way though.

When I did some quick googling of prices, the 570 seems to be priced more or less the same as a 660Ti, which is why I suggested it. It no doubt depends on which brands you get, so you can get a cheaper 570, but there is not a huge difference in pricing in the more well known brands between the 2 cards. About a $25-$50 difference, which is why I would suggest spending the extra bit of money on the 660 if there is any way that you can. If not, totally understood, was just a suggestion, as they are not vastly different in price points.

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As members have pointed out you can get 1155 motherboards really cheaply now, and even most of the low end boards support UEFI, so you'll be futureproof, you could probably get a low end ivy bridge i5 and a reasonable 1155 board for $200-250

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Thanks for the reply larry, have been looking at the prices and you're right, if i got a phenom ii x4 oc it to 4ghz and get a decent heat sink then dump the rest of the cash on getting a 660ti, it will probally be the better option, not really looked at bench marks for the 660ti yet but presumily it is on par or faster that the 570? oc'd i would imagine it could push 580 performance? no on par ovc but similar.

after looking at you're post count larry it seems u are a bit of a lejend on these here forums lol whats you're opinion on the phenom ii x4? i have read so amny mix opinions, all of witch end with, just buy an i5 lol also heard people having problems with the x4 in bf3 after a patch update but it only effects some people.

- Anton.

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