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Advice Please: Graphics Card vs CPU Clock Scaling.

Nelly

Nelly

Nelly

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Joined
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Just wondering as I'm going to be buying a new CPU & Graphics Card.

Primarily gaming, what I need to know is this . . .

Say I purchased a Q9550/Q9650 clocked to 3.8ghz or a E8500/E8600 clocked to 4.2ghz, would the clock give me a significant boost to warrant purchasing the dual core?

I'll be gaming at 1920X1200, will be looking at either the HD4870, GTX 280 or HD4870X2 (most likely choice)

From what I gathered with the 8800GTX it topped out with a CPU at around 3.6ghz.

I cant see any reviews showing how much difference the CPU clock makes. :(
 
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Nelly said:
Just wondering as I'm going to be buying a new CPU & Graphics Card.

Primarily gaming, what I need to know is this . . .

Say I purchased a Q9550/Q9650 clocked to 3.8ghz or a E8500/E8600 clocked to 4.2ghz, would the clock give me a significant boost to warrant purchasing the dual core?

I'll be gaming at 1920X1200, will be looking at either the HD4870, GTX 280 or HD4870X2 (most likely choice)

From what I gathered with the 8800GTX it topped out with a CPU at around 3.6ghz.

I cant see any reviews showing how much difference the CPU clock makes. :(
Click to expand...
CPU does not make much difference unless you are gaming above 1920x1200 with SLI/Xfire the GPU is nearly always the bottleneck.

Dual core CPU's are faster in most games and usually clock higher but Quad Core can do more tasks (even whilst gaming) so are a better choice when the FPS difference is small anyway.

This could all change in the future when more games use more Cores but for now any of your CPU/GPU choices would be excellent.

Personally I would go for the Quad as you would be surprised what you can do with it whilst also gaming !!
 
The quads win in games that fully utilise there 4 cores but there are not to many games that do this atm. So the higher clocked dual cores win in most games i would say. For me though i would get the quad as things can only improve with them in the future. Take a look at this link shows you some benches quad v dual.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2duo-e8600_6.html#sect0
 
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Quad core is the future.

You will get better performance with a faster clocked dual core, on very old games such as FSX.

But newer games will deffo be optimised for multi cores. Just look at UT3, it has very good quad core utilisation.
 
Nelly, you would get just about zero difference in FPS at those speeds and I'm assuming you plat at high res. Only FSX and a couple of strategy games keep giving you more FPS are you give them more clockspeed but only a tiny bit that gives no advantage. And when more games use four cores... ...well you'd probably see no difference either as GPU would bottleneck. :)

AWPC said:
CPU does not make much difference unless you are gaming above 1920x1200 with SLI/Xfire the GPU is nearly always the bottleneck.
Click to expand...

The first part of that is wrong, you only see a difference at low resolutions not high ones where the GPU becomes even more of a bottleneck.
 
Thanks for the info, I've mentioned this thread in the other thread to see what they have to say, majority of people said dual core in that thread lol. :)
 
anant_shah94 said:
well, if it's a long term upgrade, quad core is the way defo, and if you do more than just games, then a quad core comes in handy
Click to expand...

exactly
and if you get a good clocking quad that keeps up with a dual core clock wise then there is no downside
 
Nelly said:
Thanks for the info, I've mentioned this thread in the other thread to see what they have to say, majority of people said dual core in that thread lol. :)
Click to expand...

Most people just post without thinking, so the same people will tell you that you need 1000w PSU's for a 4870x2 etc. Do some Googling and you should be able to find benchmarks easily enough.
 
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