Upgrading PC for 8 x accounts

[jnorland]

MiRai what do you think would be the best way to determine if my video card is my limiting factor or if it's my CPU? Again I have a i7 920 2.66 Ghz; Overclocked to 4.0 Ghz and the AMD HD6870. The new RAM is installed and the Crucial M4 is up and running with both the OS and WOW. Everything is running pretty good but it's still a bit sketchy when I get all the accounts up. I may try running them in DX9 as you suggested earlier but I'm considering one more upgrade. Not sure if watching task manager is enough to determine the CPU performance with all 8 games up and running. I’m guessing the 1G card is still my limiting factor but I’m wondering how much room I would gain before capping the CPU by upgrading.

I'm looking at either getting a new video card right now that will increase my performance as much as my CPU will allow (also step one in a new system down the road) or waiting until I can build a new system all together. The determining factor being how much room can I theoretically gain with the video card. I'll keep in mind that I'll never get the most out of the newer video card until I've upgraded the motherboard to PCIe 3.0.

[MiRai]

MiRai what do you think would be the best way to determine if my video card is my limiting factor or if it's my CPU?

GPU-Z and Windows Task Manager. In GPU-Z check to see what your video RAM usage and load is at.
I believe with an ATI/AMD card you should be looking at Memory Usage (Dedicated).

I'll keep in mind that I'll never get the most out of the newer video card until I've upgraded the motherboard to PCIe 3.0.

I think maybe I put too much emphasis on PCIe 2.0/3.0 in my prior posts. Right now, with PCIe 2.0 we
cannot saturate all of the available lanes with data and PCIe 3.0 is currently overkill in a single card
setup. Reading this review, you'll see that an AMD 7970 was tested in both a PCIe 2.0 slot and a PCIe
3.0 slot. As you can see you won't actually be losing out on anything and you should be able to safely
upgrade your video card now if you wanted to get a new AMD model.

The only issue that may arise is when you're going to throw multiple 3.0 video cards at a system which
can only handle 2.0. From the article:

However there are a few caveats that should be mentioned. Even though a single HD 7970 may not
saturate a PCI-E 2.0 x16 slot, things could change drastically once two of these cards are installed into
a Z68 motherboard which uses a dual 8x setup for Crossfire and SLI. Things will likely get even more
complicated when AMD’s new dual GPU product is released in the first half of 2012. We’ll likely revisit
this topic throughout 2012 but for the time being, rest assured knowing that AMD’s HD 7970 is in no
way limited by current PCI-E certifications.