In post 19, talah wrote:Hi, I'm wondering how what you said added anything to the discussion?
Are you weighing in as an expert? If so can you discuss throughput and bus speed or something (coprocessors and directx)? Cause that's what I'm confused about.
Bus speed? You mean front side bus? If you get a processor that's designed to run at a higher bus speed than the motherboard you buy, yes that will hold your cpu speed back. (Sometimes mismatched bus speed will keep you from being able to use the CPU at all. I find that to be the case with a lot of the Pentium 4 tech we see at work.) This is also no longer relevant with modern cpus because the front side bus has been replaced with Quickpath Interconnect by Intel and Hypertransport by AMD.
In post 16, talah wrote:I wish an expert would step in here!
From what I know Graphics Cards are like a microcosm of a full computer setup.
So analogously you could buy a "rad" new CPU, but if you combine it with crap last-gen RAM, a motherboard with a limited bus speed and a really old HDD, the relevance of the chip becomes less important than the bottlenecks elsewhere.
Mentioned above about front side bus, but generally the rad new CPU requires a motherboard that won't let you use last-gen ram.
The best way to say it is that a Graphics Card is a part of the sum of the whole in a computer. There are things you can do on a computer reasonably well without one, but if gaming is what you're looking for, generally upgrading your video card will make a big difference in running your games well.
Having last gen memory specs would affect the performance of a game a little bit, and an old hard drive would affect the speed that your games load at, but the general performance of a game during play depends a good deal on the quality of the video card.
If the machine is old, the video card interface itself could be a bottleneck if you buy a high end video card, so that would be the main reason to not go top of the line if the machine is reasonably old.
In post 19, talah wrote:?? probably a bad analogy but my experience years ago was 'hey, a cheap new brand new chip on a card - woohoo!' Followed by really crap performance. Frustrated, I decided to shell out for an expensive one with seemingly lower specs in the things I thought were important: chip recentness, total RAM size - only to read the fine print on the shiny 300 and something dollar box and find out it did the fancy pixel shading and had onboard codec chips and yadda yadda and so forth. And worked a crapload better too.
So you may well be better off going for an older chip if the card itself offers better performance.
EXPERTS!!!
There's a lot that determines the performance of a video card. How recent it was made and the ram size aren't all that important in terms of performance. (Though you do need to meet the ram requirements to play various games.)
But yeah, Video card performance is determined by things like Core clock, shader clock, number of cores, effective memory clock, memory type, RAMDAC, and memory bandwidth. That's a lot of information to compare from card to card, so a benchmarking site like the one Zito linked can save a lot of headache like that and give you an idea of where cards compare vs other cards without the headache of reading all those numbers. (Because the overall performance is a sum of the parts and it can be really hard to pin down exactly how it will perform based on that without actually having it in a machine and seeing.)
