Would A Phenom II X3 4.1GHz Bottleneck A HD 6950?

[Blom89]

I likely won't be upgrading my processor this year, and I'm in the process of preparing my PC for Battlefield 3, which comes out this fall.

I have a Phenom II X3 @ 4.1GHz and I've been looking at the HD 6950. Its at a nice price point and come this fall, I'm sure it'll be even cheaper.

Would I have any problems with bottlenecking?

HD 6950
Phenom II X3 4.1GHz
8GB DDR3 RAM

Should be what my system will look like come this fall.

[Erax]

It will. However, you will still gain significant FPS increase.

[Crazyeyesreaper]

it will not bottleneck a single 6950 but it will bottleneck a 6970 or gtx 580 or any multi gpu system.

6950 is right at the limit of which the Phenom IIs memory bandwidth will become a limiting factor

if your ram is a 1333mhz cl 7 and the northbridge at 2600mhz *it gives a 1 to 1 ratio of L3 cache speed to System Ram copy speed,

youll have no issues with bottlenecking.

Roughly put a Phenom II system has enough grunt to feed about 1500-1600 shaders on the AMD gpus,

its why 2x 6850 / 6870s scale well but 6950s / 6970s dont on an AMD cpu, where as intel scales all multi gpus systems well.


TL;DR

your fine 6950 will do alright, but if its anything to go buy, Battlefield 3 will be more cpu demanding then gpu,

a single 580 can max it but going from say a 965BE at 4ghz to a Sandybridge chip at stock theres a near 30% performance jump in Bad Company 2, BF3 will have 7 story buildings that collapse, not the 2 story ones we see in BC2 right now, larger and more demanding physics will hit the CPU hard.

[Blom89]

4x2Gb @ 1333Mhz and 9-9-9-24 is what my RAM is set at...which is the stock settings. from what I know, my ram timings arent the best.

Would there be any risk in lowering the timings to say 8-8-8-24? im a total newbie when it comes to RAM overclocking. all I know is a lower CAS Latency is better.

I found the area in my BIOS which handles RAM and it gave me the option to manually set all the timings and everything, but I didnt mess with it.

[Crazyeyesreaper]

depends on the rams default voltages

if its 1.65v you might be able to get away with 8 8 8 24 all you really need to do is set the timings and then run Memtest off a cd or usb thumb drive if it passes your rams stable problem solved

but yea in general for AMD phenom II chips keep the NB at double the ram speed and after 1600mhz theres nothing more to be gained performance wise.

so 1333 at 8 8 8 24 with a 2600mhz NB should give you a damn close ratio close enough i wouldnt worry to much about it.

but overall yea a 6950 will do just fine will be a greater then double performance gain in the gpu front.