With a pair of HD5870’s in Crossfire and a wide variety of chips, Legion Hardware takes a look at how CPU power changes the performance of these cards.  They tried a Core i7 and i3 as well as a pair of AMD chips, a Phenom II X4 and an X2 and played with their clock speeds to simulate a large number of models available for those respective chip families.  Setting the resolution to 1680×1050 takes the graphics card out of the equation and lets the performance of the CPU shine through. Read on to see how these various CPUs scale.

“However what the data recorded in this article suggests is when future games became more demanding on the CPU, the Core i7 is going to provide a higher level of performance. While this is a very likely scenario, the Core i7 has been available for well over a year now and this still has not happened. Therefore in terms of value, the Phenom II X4 still makes more sense for gaming purposes.”

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