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Written by Mavke
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Tuesday, 12 October 2004 |
Legion hardware has put a great article about CPU vs. Graphics Card. When building a computer it is important that all the hardware is relative to one another. There is little point in building a gaming machine that has a monster processor with a graphics card capable of only producing slide shows at 1280x1024. Of course the same can be said when purchasing a graphics card that will be overkill for the processor.
 CPU vs. Graphics Card
Clearly consumers must be far more careful when choosing their processor/graphics card combo. When building a computer for the purpose of gaming, there is little point skimping on either of these items just to afford a more powerful version of the other. In other words, you are doing yourself no justice by purchasing a slower processor to allow for a faster graphics card.
Purchasing one that will complement the other is the only way to go. Generally speaking, a faster processor is more important.
There are high-end, mid-range and low-end graphics cards, the same applies for processors. Evidently they are designed to work together; the hard part is working out what exactly a mid-range graphics card is at the time and the processor to suit it. This article did not explore these possibilities and I do not imagine posting one that would. There are simply far too many possibilities
to consider. An educated guess should definitely get you close to having a perfect balance between processor and rendering power.
What I can tell you is that the current high-end graphics cards require all the processing power they can get. This includes the Radeon X800 Pro/XT and
GeForce 6800 GT/Ultra graphics cards. The more MHz or even GHz thrown at these graphics cards the better, as they seem to keep rendering more frames per second. Some of you probably already knew this as it has been a common case in
the past with new high-end graphics cards. The tricky part is building a budget computer with the perfect balance. Also I can tell you that anyone with a Pentium 4 processor rated at less than 2.8GHz will be unable to utilize the full potential of a GeForce 6800 graphics card.
For these users the previous generation of flagship graphics cards will suit them far better. The much cheaper GeForceFX 5900 and Radeon 9800 graphics cards will appear just as fast when using today's mid-range processors. So if you are running a 2.8GHz Intel (1.9GHz AMD) system or less, stop saving every penny for a taste of the latest and greatest nVidia or ATI graphics products. The best bet is a previous generation flagship product until that processor is upgraded to something more substantial.
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