Will my CPU Hold back my Eyefinity Setup?

[suiken_2mieu]

I'm about to buy the 5870E6 Card, I'm planning on Running 5400x1920 (5 1080p Screens in Portrait). I currently have a Core2Duo @ 3.0 GHZ, will it be a bottleneck in my system? And will upgrading to a Core2Quad Help? Or will it be better to gut my system and buy a Corei7, new mother board, and ram? (BTW, I'm poor)

[Hydralisk_X]

It'll probably depend on the game (GTA IV and BC2 love quad cores etc.)

In general though, higher resolution is more bottlenecked by the GPU rather than CPU. So actually running eyefinity would be less bottlenecked by your core2duo in most cases than say running on a single screen I think. I'm not sure if a 5 potrait configuration is supported unless you use SoftTH in conjunction with eyefinity.

[Ceogar]

As said, it will bottleneck a bit but not that much unless it's game that uses 4 cores.

And i would recommend getting a i5 instead i7 because yeah.. a bit waste of money to get the i7.

[suiken_2mieu]

@Ceogar: Well,If I do upgrade to the next gen core processors, It's gonna cost a lot, as I'll have to buy ram, a new board, and the processor. At that point I might as well build a new rig, in which I have no real money to do so atm.

@Hydralisk_X: Yeah it's not supported yet, but I have my fingers crossed. Ibrin and doublejj0305 already have there configurations setup, so it's a good chance imo.

[Sideeffect]

You could go AM2+ and keep your RAM and go with a Phenom2 quad core. It wouldn't be quite be as fast as a I5 setup but would cost a lot less and be better than Core2Quad.

[stangflyer]

You could oc that cpu some. That 8400 should do 3.6 or so without changing any voltage settings.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/radeon-hd5870-cpu-scaling.html

This is a good article that shows the diff between c2d and quads and how clockspeed matters in games. I would keep the cpu but see if you can get it to 3.6 or so.

[suiken_2mieu]

You could oc that cpu some. That 8400 should do 3.6 or so without changing any voltage settings.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/radeon-hd5870-cpu-scaling.html

This is a good article that shows the diff between c2d and quads and how clockspeed matters in games. I would keep the cpu but see if you can get it to 3.6 or so.

Just curious, If I am to over clock, it's probably a good thing to get a better heat sink than the stock one right?

[Sideeffect]

Yes you would need to buy an aftermarket cooler to overclock properly while keeping temperatures reasonable.

That review from xbitlabs is somewhat useless, they didn't use fair comparisons. 2GB vs 6GB, DDR2 vs DDR3, 8X PCIE vs 16X and no NB frequency identified. They also don't use any quad core optimised games apart from COD.

[Yui]

Why upgrade in the first place if you don't have enough money?

[suiken_2mieu]

Why upgrade in the first place if you don't have enough money?

I buy all my parts in sections, there no point to keep playing on my TH2Go and 4870 if I cant do 5760x1080, and not have really low framerate, or play in windowed mode for a better picture, etc. ATM i have the 5 monitors, 2 VGA adapters, and will have the card bought soon (need $50). The mounts will cost 130, and the last vga adapter is 20. It's something i want to do, and i have nothing better to do with my money atm.