Planning to build a new PC and was wondering what AMD video card should i pair with these to get High setting?

Foxcon Motherboard
Phenom X4 Black Edition
4 GB Ram

6870 is a smashing great card had one before my Nvidia one. Played ultra with texture mods, shadows on medium, 1080p, 60fps.

I Guess the first question that should be asked is, How much are you willing to spend? Budget?

Youre building one with the Phenom IIx4? While a great CPU, its several years old now.

But what budget are you looking for and what games do you plan on playing? (I ask, because if you wish to max Crysis 2, you will be paying a bit more than if you only wish to max Skyrim)

Sorry for the late reply,

Hmm actually i think i'l be going with Phenom II X6 Black, 8GB Ram and maybe the 6870, will that max it out?
or will a HD6770 1GB DDR5 128BIT VX max it out with the right settings?

Do yourself a favor, and a get an Intel processor. They are so much better for gaming. Either a Sandy Bridge, or one of the new Ivy Bridge ones that come out next week. i5-2500k or i5-3570K for ~$220 are the sweet spot for gamers.

Just an example of a benchmark of cpus with Skryim:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-fx-pentium-apu-benchmark,3120-3.html
http://www.pcgameshardware.de/aid,855679/The-Elder-Scrolls-5-Skyrim-20-CPUs-im-Benchmark-Test-Test-des-Tages/Rollenspiel-Adventure/Test/

AMD videocards are fine.
Although the nvidia cards do a little bit better in Skyrim, on average in other games the AMD cards have the same value/dollar.

Seems like Nvidia is better for Skyrim, people have been posting complaints about AMD's drivers.

Enter any other game related forum and you will see many threads about problems with Catalyst. nVidia has its own driver problems but to name few in comparison to ATI. Imo, ATI is developing drivers too fast without much testing (and drops support for older cards too).

Problems with AMD cards are exaggerated. Performance between games varies slightly between nVidia and AMD. But it depends on the game. Some people keep nagging about drivers. Both AMD and nVidia drivers. But for some reason, the bad reputation of AMD from 10 years ago keep being dragged in. Fact is, gamers with AMD cards are playing just as many games today, with similar performance as nVidia gamers do. There are some real but small differences, like AMD cards support multi-screen setups better, and do better CrossFire. AMD cards tend to have more vram, which is very good when modding a game like Skyrim. Where nVidia usually has slightly better support when a new game is released, and AMD users might sometimes need to wait 1-2 weeks before they get optimized drivers. No big deal, imho.

For CPUs it is different. At the high-end (> $150) nVidia is outperforming AMD. Especially for gamers. Having more cores (which AMD cpus have) isn't as useful as having high per-core performance. AMD cards shine with their integrated GPUs, outperforming Intel's integrated GPUs by a magnitude. But as gamers should always have a discrete GPU (aka a separate card), that doesn't help gamers at all.

Hmm so will a i5-2500k + GTX 570 or 560 Ti be a good combination? why not a i7?

An i7 is not worth the extra money if you only plan on playing games. However, if you plan on doing video editing or rendering, then the extra performance will help quite a bit.

Whatever you do, at least get a "k" version Intel CPU. I didn't realize until last week that the new PC I bought last year had a "k" version i7 2600. I went into the BIOS and effortlessly pushed that multiplier up to 42. Now heavily shadowed scenes in Skyrim run like butta.

Phenom X4 BE is right under the i5 2500k so both are pretty mid range at the moment. Both can be safely OC'd. If you have some more cash i7 2600k imo.

For gamers, there is absolutely no reason to get a i7 cpu over a i5 cpu. So please don't advise people on gamer forums to buy the wrong cpu.

The i7 cpus will hardly give you any extra performance over i5 cpus, unless your application uses more than 4 threads. And no games whatsoever today use more than 4 threads. (Before someone starts nitpicking, you need 4+ balanced threads, not 2 big threads and a bunch of small ones).

On top of that, framerates in games depend mostly on your videocard. Not on your cpu. So buying an expensive cpu makes no sense, unless you have the top of the line videocard. (And imho only gtx580, gtx680 and the AMD 7000 series are top of the line at the moment). Therefor the i7 chips have almost no extra value over the i5 cpus. (You get a 3% higher frequency, and 2MB more cache, which will not do much for your framerates).

So please buy an i5 cpu.
You'll save ~ 100 euros/dollars, compared to buying a similar i7 cpu.
Then be smart, and use those 100 euros/dollars to buy a better videocard.
A much better use of your money.
Your framerates will be much higher.

During the last year, that was the recommend combination by most people. If you wanted a fast gaming machine for a reasonable amount of money.

However, the landscape just changed.
Intel is releasing their new Ivy Bridge CPUs next week.
The i5-3570K is the successor of the i5-2500K.
If you already have a i5-2500K, then there hardly is a reason to spend money to upgrade your i5-2500K.
But if you have an older CPU, then of course you should buy the new i5-3570K, and not the older i5-2500K.

Gtx560ti and gtx570 are both excellent videocards. And excellent value for their money.
However, both AMD and nVidia have released a new generation of videocards in the last months.
And more models are expected in the next few months.
Nvidia has released a gtx680. Excellent card. (I got one, I love it). But it is 500 dollars/euros. And sometimes not easy to order.
People expect a gtx660 or gtx670 in May. The gtx660 might be the true successor of the gtx560ti. I expect 200-250 euros/dollars.
AMD had released good cards too, in their new 7000 series. The 7970 is their top card, comparable with the gtx680.
But AMD already has more models out in their 7000 series. Check the benchmarks on the Internet to find out which one is best match for you.

This is usually the case but Skyrim relies heavily on CPU performance. If either your CPU or video card are lacking, Skyrim will show it.
With that said, I agree that there won't be any noticeable difference between an i7 and i5 (assuming similar Mhz speed) - go with the i5 and get a better video card instead.

Also, my system runs Skyrim very well and my CPU is 4½ years old (Q6700). It's running with 8GB's of RAM (CPU and RAM overclocked) and a Hawk GTX460 video card (also overclocked). I get smooth 40+ fps most of the time. I have the official high res texture pack installed and almost all eye candy maxed and other eye candy settings turned up in .ini (ugrids=7, grass view distance maxed, etc..).


Edit - @Gryz - Buying one of the new Ivy Bridge CPU's would be a waste. The performance gain is in the 0-5% range (not counting integrated GPU). Once they hit the streets and the Sandy Bridge chips start going on sale in a couple of weeks (or sooner) THAT'S the time to buy a Sandy Bridge CPU.

While I find my i5 fine atm I am willing to bet that next year there will be plenty of games that will take advantage of the extra speed that the i7 can achieve with a stock cooler oc'd (keep in mind an after market cooler has to be tacked to the price of the CPU if you plan to OC it). All that said I agree the i5 has the power and expandability for gaming at less of a price.

Definitely go with an i5 2500k. I would also get a different motherboard (check out Gigabyte, Asus, or MSI brands). You can overclock the 2500k very easily, even up to 4.5Ghz on the stock Intel heatsink/fan. If you get a good aftermarket cooler you can probably crank it up to 4.7 or 4.8 no problem. An i7 is a total waste unless you are using a lot of multi-threaded applications (not games).

Good to hear people agree.
Small detail. While Skyrim was very CPU-dependent at release, after the 1.3 patch things changed significantly. Skyrim is still a little more heavy on the CPU than other modern games (like Crysis2). But it is not that much. Having a better videocard is much more important now.

I'll give you an example.
In November I had a E8500 cpu (2 cores, 3.1GHz) and gtx260 videocard. For some dumb reason last year I decided to not upgrade, but wait. I will buy a new i5-3570K next week. But I did buy a new gtx680 last month. The gtx680 increased my framerates, but not by much. The old CPU kept my framerates from hitting a constant 60 fps. But that didn't matter for me. I kept enabling more eyecandy. And my framerates kept almost constant. (Measuring in places like the Whiterun stairs and Markath). Now I run ultra settings, 8xMSAA, Transparency 4xSSAA, very high SSAO, 16xAF, high-res texture pack, a few custom mods (water, vurt's). And my framerates are almost the same as they were before enabling those features. My conclusion: my old E8500 is not fast enough to get 60 fps at all times. However, my E8500 is fast enough to drive my gtx680 to enable any eyecandy I can think of. For me, that is good enough. And saying "Skyrim is heavily CPU-dependent" is not fully true.


0.5 Performance gain over what ? Over Sandy Bridge ? You are right that compared to Sandy Bridge framerates will go up by only a few percent. (Overall Ivy is 5-10% faster than Sandy). But compared to my E8500 (or your Q6700) I expect my framerates to go from 30-60 to 40-60 or 45-60.

About waiting a few weeks before buying Ivy Bridge. Nope, certainly not gonna do that. I might wait 2-3 days until my favorite webshops have them in stock. And prices of Ivy Bridge will drop down to official retail prices. (Current pre-release prices are 40-50 euros higher than that. Shops that are illegally selling already). But prices of Sandy Bridge will not drop anytime soon. That is not how Intel does it.

I paid 230 euros for my E8500 in January 2008. I checked price history. The E8500 was last available (in Dutch webshops) in January 2012. The price then was 185 euros. Last known prices were from 2010 and 2011, and during those two years, the price was ~190-200 euros. Imho, that means that the prices have hardly dropped during the 4 years it was sold. If I remember correctly, that is always how it goes with Intel CPUs. Videocards is a different story, those sometimes drop in price over the years, sometimes stay at the same price for a while. But not CPUs. Last year I waited to buy a gtx580 or gtx560. The prices have hardly changed in a 12 month timeframe. (Dollar going up a bit didn't help here too).

The game for me is to get the best performance for my money. It is easy to just throw a lot of money at new hardware every year (even if you have it). Optimizing your machine is a tricky game. You need to keep track of performance of components, the prices, the expected new hardware coming out soon, potential upgrade paths and compatability, etc. Next week I'll have my Ivy Bridge (and z77 mobo and new ram), and I'll be set for another 2 years.

I was talking about buying a Sandy not an Ivy. It's not Intel that has these price drops - it's the retailers.
You're right about the cost of older chips, I was looking for something for my 775 chipset and, to my dismay, the cost of a Q9650 is more that a new Sandy Bridge! However, once a new chip comes out, retailers will *sometimes* discount current stock to move it and make room for the new merchandise. I see it all the time. I'm expecting the Sandy Bridge CPU's at some retailers to drop by $10-20 (plus maybe an extra special coupon code for an additional XXX off). Whether it will be 1, 2, 3, or 4 weeks after the Ivy Bridge comes out remains to be seen. Also, this price drop isn't permanent. It will stay around for a few days, maybe a week, before the coupon code goes away and the price goes right back up to where it was.

I plan to pick up my Sandy Bridge during this 'spring sale'.

Thanks for all the very useful replies!

One more thing though can you guys recommend a good motherboard to pair with the i5? a complete name would be nice and how good must my power supply be? yeah i'm kinda noobish with these hehe

For motherboards, you can chose between several "chipsets". I would recommend a Z68 or Z77 chipset motherboard. The chipset is often in the name. The Z77 is newer, so I would recommend that over the Z68 one, especially if motherboards are at around the same prices.

There are several good motherboard manufacturers.
Asus and ASRock are basically the same company. I like them. I have an Asus motherboard right now myself. I will buy a new ASRock Z77 motherboard myself next week. (When I buy my new CPU).
Gigabyte and MSI make excellent motherboards too.

Usually manufactorers make several different motherboards with the same chipset. The difference is often that the more expensive motherboards have more exotic features. Usually you don't need those. So the cheaper motherboards are just as good for you. (As long as brand and chipset are the same). E.g normally you can add 6 harddisks (or SSDs or DVD-players). And with the expensive board you can add 8 or 12. Or with the expensive board you can do SLI or CF (having more than 1 videocard), while with the cheaper motherboard only 1 videocard.

Example:
ASRock makes 10 different Z77 motherboards.
http://www.asrock.com/mb/index.us.asp
The ASRock Pro3 costs 80-90 euros (in my country).
The ASRock Fatal1ty Z77 Performance costs 150-160 euros.
What is the difference ? One more DVI-D output (which doesn't matter, because we buy a separate videocard anyway). Some more robust capacitators. Better "build quality" isn't gonna give us more fps. The expensive board doesn't even have more PCI-E 16x slots (which would be good for SLI/CF). So I guess the Pro3 is just as good as the Fatality for most users.

So I recommend the ASRock Pro3 Z77 for people who build a new PC with an i5 or i7 CPU.
I might buy it myself. Or I might buy the ASRock Extreme 4 myself (125 euros).
That being said, the other brands (Asus, Gigabyte, MSI) aren't much worse or better, imho. I just like ASRock (and Asus) myself.

====
About the powersupply, I am not sure what to recommend.
There are many good brands. And unfortunatly also many not good brands. Pick a brand that is a bit known, not just any unnamed brand. CoolerMaster, Enermax, Nexus, OCZ, Seasonic, Silverstone, they all make good PSUs. I am sure I've forgotten a few brands. And I am sure other people on this forum will disagree.
Usually a good PSU in the 500-650W range will cost 40-60 euros/dollars.

Then try to figure out how much wattage you need.
There are many sites that help you there.
Example: http://support.asus.com/powersupply.aspx
Select the components you will have in your system, and the website will give you a minimum wattage. I think the recommended wattage here is pretty high, so you don't need to add extra, "just to be safe".

I'm a fan of Gigabyte's Durability series (also called Ultra Durable) boards but the last one I purchased was the GA-EP45-UD3 so it's been a while.
I will say that I've got a Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 that's been running an ESXi host with 4 server 2008 R2 VM servers (DC, Exchange, Web/FTP server) and a Win 7 VM for a year and a half, perfectly. I've even got the E6300 powering it overclocked from 1.86 to 2.8Ghz.

Note: The motherboards I list are old. I'm just speaking about the quality of these two boards. I haven't purchased a new MB for a while now. Maybe others can chime in on the quality of Gigabyte's more recent 'durability series' boards (or lack thereof).

Edit - 'Robust capacitors' usually means solid, not electrolytic. I've seen too many distended caps through the years, I will only buy boards with solid caps now.

Edit 2 - As for PS's, Gryz listed several good name brands. A few questions need to be answered before you decide though. 1st, pick a MB so you'll know what type of connector you need. Next do you plan on running SLI/Crossfire or single video card? Do you plan on hooking up 1-2 hard drives or 5-6 hard drives? Do you plan on having a RAID controller or or other PCI/PCIe cards?

My MB works great but I am sure you can find a cheaper one that still does everything you need. I bought mine for the thermal shield which I hope keeps the resin and film that smoking leaves behind over time on the shield and not the actual board.

My computer runs Skyrim fine and smoothly on my ATI Radeon HD 5450 1GB (Gigabyte) graphics card very finely.