Upgrade CPU or GPU first?

Currently have the 720qm and 2x5870m's. Read people are playing BF3 without issue on Ultra with these cards. That would probably be one of the most graphically intensive games I'd be playing right now, so wondering if maybe the weak 720qm is bottlenecking these cards anyways? Was thinking of picking up a 920XM as they are only 200$ or so now, while 940XM are around 475$ it seems. Do people notice a pretty big difference with even things like application load times and such? Or would I not really notice any difference? Probably upgrade my hard drives to SSD after.

 

I just dont see how there would be a ton of difference between a 2.8ghz max clock and a 3.2ghz max clock. I've overclocked mine to 3.2ghz and didnt notice much of a difference in windows, very little in 3dmark. Maybe SSD would be the biggest difference?

 

1x 7970M GPU instead of 2x5870M

That would be already 2x more FPS. And would give biggest difference,

Max core colock means nothing in non-XM CPUs, because they cannot reach this clock on all 4 cores at one time, only on 1 or 2 cores, 920XM is capable of running 3.5GHz@ 4 cores, while 720QM only 1.6Ghz, so 2x slower, which in games like BF4 would be really a BIG Advantage, believe me.

 

Sounds great, definitely the info I missed! I will most likely be picking up a 920XM pretty quick then. 5870M's are plenty for me currently, as they are enough for Ultra on BF3 and if I buy BF4, will be for my PS4.

 

Adunno how you ran BF3 on ultra @ 1200p with your setup, mine ran only on medium @ 1200p, and ultra at 1680x1050 and mine has 920XM.

 

Minimum "acceptable" frame rate can be down to personal taste.

 

Well, dont have to run at full 1200p to be happy, lol.

 

Would this card work in the R2? I realized the new drivers work fine with the 5870M, as long as Xfire is disabled. Lame.

MSI AMD HD 7970M 2GB GDDR5 216 0836036 MXM 3 0 VGA Card | eBay

 

All VBIOS potential problems (someone else would have to answer for the MSI cards) there are one other "issue" with this 7970M card.

You will never be able to crossfire it, meaning that would be the end of the line coming to crossfire.
Buying a card with Clevo or Dell will make your computer still upgradeable in the GPU way. MSI does not crossfire from what ive read before.

Then again, running down in the document under the link, you see that they call it 8970 too and for Dell and Clevo. The last bit is probably just that it should work in those two computers playing it safe talking about last generation only.

 

I would go for the GPU 1st, a 7970 should be more than enough.