• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

Matching Gfx card & processor manufacturer

Gandeh

Gandeh

Gandeh

Associate
Joined
21 Jul 2011
Posts
545
Hey folks,

So simple question;

Do I need to stick rigidly to the rule that if you are going for an AMD processor you should go for a ATI card?

Likewise if I go for an intel processor should I be going for a Nividia?


The reason I'm asking is because I wanted to get one of the new BD processors and use it with a GTX 580. But someone posed the question to me was it wise to mix them as previously I had always stuck to the above rule.
 
As far as I'm aware, not any more, no. Only thing to check is if you're wanting dual graphics cards. There was I think a time where not all boards supported both x-fire and SLI, though I think many now do - just check the motherboard details first :)
 
I was not aware that was even a rule and I have been building since the early 90s, so you should be fine. But like the above post says check what multi GPU setups the motherboard can handle if you are going down that route.
 
As above, don't worry about mixing AMD boards and Nvidia graphics cards (or Intel boards and Nvidia/AMD graphics cards), it really doesn't make any difference these days. Even to the point where 900 series AMD boards support SLI as well as crossfire, and modern higher-end Intel boards support SLI and crossfire too.

Have you already bought the 990FX ASUS Sabretooth board, or is it just what you plan to go for when Bulldozer drops? If you haven't bought it already then I would suggest waiting until the Bulldozer reviews come out, as for tasks like gaming these new chips may still not be up to a quad core sandy bridge like the i5 2500K.
 
The very fastest is the i7 2600K, but that is only slightly faster than the i5 2500K (due to a slightly higher stock clockspeed and hyperthreading) and around £70 more expensive. When running at the same clockspeed - the vast majority of games are just as fast on the 2500K as on the 2600K, and both chips overclock extremely well.

Since few games can use more than four cores (most can't even use four effectively) then going for a CPU with more than four cores, but with each core slower than one of those on a 2500K then the Bulldozer CPUs are unlikely to beat the quad core Sandy bridge CPUs in gaming tests. However they should do well in multi-threaded apps like video encoding. Though I guess we will have to wait to see exactly how the two rivals compare.
 
Jleo said:
Vmware application developers/end users and on-line cluster processing (research) users folding etc, could make great use of 8 cores.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=8+core+optimized+applications&hl=en&biw=1280&bih=963&num=10&lr=&ft=i&cr=&safe=images&tbs=,qdr:m

Jleo
Click to expand...

Aye, absolutely. There are a lot of people excited about the new bulldozer 8 cores, inlcuding video editing folks and number crunchers.

However, the OP specifically wants "the fastest and best processor for gaming at the moment" which the bulldozer doesn't seem to be on track to be - since modern games are not coded to make efficient use of all 8 processors. Therefore four faster processors (like the sandy bridge) will tend to perform better in these situations. However, I guess we will have to wait for the launch reviews to see how they compare in real-world situations, maybe both CPUs will be "good enough" and heavily limited by GPUs in most games.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom