VOGONS


First post, by KT7AGuy

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I've got 2 6800 GTs that I run with an Athlon 64 3700+ ClawHammer S754 and an Athlon 64 3400+ Venice S754. Both CPUs run at 2400MHz; the only difference is the L2 cache. The 3700+ has 1MB while the 3400+ has 512KB. The difference in performance between these two processors is negligible. I've always felt that the 6800 GT was a good match for these CPUs.

However, I've recently been doing some thinking about some of my Win98SE builds, and I'm starting to think that the GPUs that I've chosen for these systems are not well matched. They are:

FX 5950 Ultra with Athlon XP 2100+
GF4 Ti4600 with Athlon 1400 Thunderbird

For the FX5950 Ultra and GF4 Ti4600, what do you think are the best CPUs to pair them with, in both Intel and AMD options?

For the Athlon XP 2100+ and Athlon 1400 Thunderbird, what do you think are the best GPUs for them? (NVIDIA only, please).

(Phil recently made a video which is what got me thinking about this.)

Thank you for your thoughts and opinions.

Reply 1 of 7, by The Serpent Rider

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1. Phils benchmarks are not taking into account image quality settings on more modern cards.
2. You need extremely powerful CPU to avoid any limitations in certain scenarios. So it's really pointless to "match" specific CPU-GPU pair outside of notorious examples like Voodoo I.

I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.

Reply 3 of 7, by Fusion

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If you want to match and have awesome performance, find the fastest CPU that came out the same year your cards did.

Pentium III @ 1.28Ghz - Intel SE440xBX-2 - 384MB PC100 - ATi Radeon DDR 64MB @ 200/186 - SB Live! 5.1 - Windows ME

Reply 4 of 7, by candle_86

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Fusion wrote:

If you want to match and have awesome performance, find the fastest CPU that came out the same year your cards did.

not always a match that way, in recent history, the 7800GTX 512 reached its potential with Core 2, while the GTX 280 needed a fast i7 to reach its true potential

Reply 5 of 7, by KT7AGuy

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Thanks for all the replies!

It sounds like the Athlon 64 3400+ will more than max out the GF4 Ti4600's potential.

What about the FX 5950 Ultra? At what point do you think its potential gets maxed out? Maybe I should consider looking for a socket 939 board to get a faster Athlon 64? Is the Athlon 64 4000+ really all that much faster than the 3700+? They both run at 2400MHz and have 1MB L2 cache.

Reply 6 of 7, by swaaye

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939 is mostly about more memory bandwidth for dual core. The AMD rating tells you there is a small gain with single core but I don't think it would be tangible.

Reply 7 of 7, by Standard Def Steve

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candle_86 wrote:
Fusion wrote:

If you want to match and have awesome performance, find the fastest CPU that came out the same year your cards did.

not always a match that way, in recent history, the 7800GTX 512 reached its potential with Core 2, while the GTX 280 needed a fast i7 to reach its true potential

Only if you're playing really old games at low resolutions. My Opteron 185 @ 3GHz was pushing a much faster 8800GTS-640MB to its limit @ 1920x1200.

My i7-4930K @ 4.6GHz was released in 2013 and it's easily saturating my poor, overclocked GTX 970. This card was already begging for mercy when I was playing at 2560x1440; now it's completely out of breath at 3440x1440. I'm sure a 1080Ti would double the framerate. I don't even want to think about how GPU-starved this machine (or even a first gen i7) would be with a...GTX 280.

I wouldn't worry too much about matching GPU and CPU performance. I use a 6800GT with my PIII-S and a GTX 560 with my Opteron 185. They work just fine, and the P3 especially has tons of GPU headroom to play with.

P6 chip. Triple the speed of the Pentium.
Tualatin: PIII-S @ 1628MHz | QDI Advance 12T | 2GB DDR-310 | 6800GT | X-Fi | 500GB HDD | 3DMark01: 14,059
Dothan: PM @ 2.9GHz | MSI Speedster FA4 | 2GB DDR2-580 | GTX 750Ti | X-Fi | 500GB SSD | 3DMark01: 43,190