Why you really don't need to buy in i7 CPU for gaming (or even an i5).

[dahuman]

disolitude said:

dharh said:
Yes and no. Often the reason to having one the newer CPUs is memory speed supported. You're mostly right though. Being GPU bound is the usual suspect for poor performance.

You're right but most of us have some DDR2 memory around and older parts that could put together to make a solid gaming rig. One just needs to slap a current gen GPU and they should be good to go.

Look at my situation... I took a 3 way SLI AM2+ mobo (Asus M3NHT), 8 GB of DDR2 800 memory and Phenom X4 940 BE and overclocked the crap out of them. They are running Crysis 2 on 3 monitors as good as my friends newly built i5 2500k rig with DDR3 1600 Memory with same GPU hardware.

PCIe 3.0 vs 2.0 also makes no difference.

you are right on the PCIe 3 makes no difference, for now, that will change in 2014 or 2015 though, which is still 1-2 years away lol