Quote Originally Posted by The Stig View Post
No problems ,just wanted to know how much better performance i would get with a 3rd gen i7 ,like the 3770k .
Everything is running quiet well ,but theres always an itch for more performance lol.
Firstly, your i7-870 won't bottleneck the GTX660 Ti. It would bottleneck something like a GTX680, but the 660 Ti is easier to handle.

Depending on the game, the most you'll see in terms of maximum frame rate would be around 10% improvement. Its the minimum and average framerates where the most gains moving to something like Ivy Bridge are seen, as demonstrated by this Techreport review



With Nehalem-based chips and a HD7950 on Batman, there are several drops below 25fps (around 55ms on the graph) although 99% of the time it'll be hovering around 60fps. Still, Crysis 3 is a little easier on the CPU. Compare the Nehalem scores to Ivy Bridge chips...



As you can see, the HD7950 is the bottleneck with the chips because at those settings the game runs out of GPU grunt, although the Ivy Bridge processors dip below 30fps less frequently and keep average framerates relatively high. Batman: AC is a thread and cache-heavy game, so higher clock speeds and more cache would improve the performance, but not by much. There's not a lot of frame time data for Crysis 3, so this is the closest you'll get for a while. Its a very taxing game and frequently brings much more expensive hardware to its knees.