8800 GTS cards and intel processors

[Damo111176]

I have read an interesting article on graphics cards and read that the way to get the best out of this card you need a top range CPU. Nothing short of dual core solution is recommended and the AMD X2 5000 will still cause a a bottleneck, Intels core 2 duo fares no better either and suffers even more from the fact thsaast there is no onboard memory controller.

Now I am no techy wizard but was under the impression that the Core 2 Duo 6600 was a pretty darn good CPU but I am begining to question that notion.

What are peoples thoughts?

[zephod]

It is true that the processor causes a bottleneck in some games with the highest end graphics cards. However, with an E6600 and 8800GTS, if the cpu is causeing a bottleneck i would imagine you are already generating good fps even at max settings and high resolution. THG recently did an article on a budget system (~£300) + an 8800GTX. It performed remarkably well in most games at max spec. Interesting.

[Blitzen]

I have read an interesting article on graphics cards and read that the way to get the best out of this card you need a top range CPU. Nothing short of dual core solution is recommended and the AMD X2 5000 will still cause a a bottleneck, Intels core 2 duo fares no better either and suffers even more from the fact thsaast there is no onboard memory controller.

Now I am no techy wizard but was under the impression that the Core 2 Duo 6600 was a pretty darn good CPU but I am begining to question that notion.

What are peoples thoughts?

I have just reead that article aswell (in MicroMart i think it was).
Strange but possibly true.

[Biscuit]

I also read a similar article when i was doing research b4 i got my 8800. God knows how much bottleneck a 939 puts on it :s

[acrobat]

Every PC has a bottleneck somewhere. The thing with the 8800 cards is that they are so fast. So you need a good CPU to keep up.

It all depends on what you are a running though, and if its a game - it depends which particular game, because they all stress different parts of the PC more than others.

But from what I've read, an E6600 just about bottlenecks an 8800GTX. But if you overclock the E6600, it can keep up with the 8800GTX and no longer causes a bottleneck. So I don't know the exact figures, but I'm guessing that if the E6600 bottlenecks an 8800GTS, then it must be by a very small amount.

I've got an E6600 and an 8800GTX, and I once did a 3dMark 2006 test on my PC, and the score was something like 10055. I was talking to someone on some forum, who had an almost identical PC. They said their score was very similar to that. They then overclocked their cpu to 3ghz, and the score went up to about 11020. So that goes to show that the CPU was indeed holding the graphics card back. Although it doesn't make a huge difference. I'm not sure, but I think if he continued to overclock that CPU, it would catch up to the GTX pretty fast, and by the time he reached about 3.2ghz or something, it wouldn't be a bottleneck anymore. So basically, these C2D are bottlenecking the 8800 cards, but I think its a really close call. And a bit of overclocking of the C2D chip and it evens it out. And like someone above said, by the time that bottleneck is ever actually reached in a game.. your frame rates are usually so good and the graphics are cranked so nobody really minds Later this year when Crysis and stuff are released though, theres probably going to be more people wanting to overclock their C2D chip. The fortunate thing I suppose, is that their prices are so good. I spent just over £200 on mine at Christmas Its now worth £140 odd I think. Although I'm a bit gutted to see the cost of my components dropping like that, the good thing is that by next Christmas, I could probably save up and just buy another one - a fast quad core Especially thanks to these huge price cuts that are due to hit. It also makes me feel a bit better that my friend spent a fortune (600 odd quid or more) on a high end quad core, and he isn't getting better frame rates than me. So if I buy a quad core later this year for about £200, my total spent will be about £400 and I'll have the same as him yet it cost me £200 (or more) less, and yet I haven't had any worse frame rates over that time.

Im really impressed with all this new gear.

[tigerboyce]

But with the arrival of DX10 or is it just the 8 series itself i cant quite remember, alot more of the graphical work like processing textures and physics is nearly all done on the graphics card itself to leave alot more CPU free?

[aidanjt]

But with the arrival of DX10 or is it just the 8 series itself i cant quite remember, alot more of the graphical work like processing textures and physics is nearly all done on the graphics card itself to leave alot more CPU free?

Exactly, the whole point of programmable shadders is to offload mathematically complex, and intensive code to the GPU. And why would the placement of the memory controller effect graphics card performance?.. The majority of the memory I/O between RAM and GPU is direct, very little is processed through the CPU, knowing that, would it not be faster for the GPU if the memory I/O controller was placed in the same unit as the GPU bus bridge, i.e. the Northbridge?..

[acrobat]

Also, these multi core processors aren't being used properly yet either. They are fast but the multiple cores is meant to make them super fast. Unless a program or a game runs multi threaded, then they are basically just using all the cores at the same time in not a particularly efficient way. When stuff starts making better use of the multiple cores, it will unload whole processes to one core, and then the other core (or the other 3 cores if you have a quad) will have something else to do.

I remember reading about Alan Wake and that is going to make good use of multi cores. Infact, I think a dual core is going to be the minimum requirement for that game.

[aidanjt]

Indeed, the majority of the software uses threads in a very bad, & unbalanced way, usually threads are a bi-product of the various libs programs use rather than an intentional efficient programming effort.