GPU Advice for Gaming-heavy Rig

[Mouzafphaerre]

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Thanks Husar and Lemur. Unless there are other recommendations or ideas we'll be going the Core 2 Quad way with 4 G RAM and the GTX 260.
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[pevergreen]

I'm not expert, but in the reading I've done over the last few weeks to figure out whats going on with the new stuff, isn't it cheaper to get an i7 quad core than a core 2 quad?

Also, from that reading I did, I support the intel/nvidea options, apparently they are just in front in graphics cards, but behind in cost ratio or something, whereas intel cores are miles ahead.

[Mouzafphaerre]

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The i7 is comparable to the Hyper-threaded P4, as I was explained to by my said consultant. Unfortunately, I'm not even 1% of a geek to re-explain it. But my mind and heart ain't warming to the i7 thing, which I sense to be the usual Intelish semi-step before their new leap (Celeron, P2, Celeron again, HT...).

Thanks for the Intel + nVidia vote.
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[Husar]

Well, the Core i7 usually costs considerably more than a comparable Core 2 at the moment, partly because of the motherboard and RAM required.
Hyperthreading is nice I guess but not for gaming and if you want your Adobe to be faster, I think they support CUDA now which should be considerably faster than even a Core i7 with HT.

Here are some CUDA benchmarks showing that at least the Core 2 quads can't really come up to an NVidia graphicscard using CUDA as long as it's not a low-end graphicscard. Ok, not every program supports CUDA but there are coming more and more so I don't really see the point in spending a lot more on a better CPU when it's useless for games(graphicscard being the bottleneck unless you get like four of them) and when a decent graphicscard can do video conversion and similar tasks faster anyway.

[Caius]

I'm a old gamer, but I read this (need the approval of the gurugahs) and wonder what they can say:

Some early articles suggested that i7's design is not ideal for gaming performance. In a test performed on leaked hardware, a Core i7 940 compared to a QX9770 showed the Core i7 to be slower than Yorkfield clock-for-clock in two trials, while being faster in two others. The difference in all cases was small, and was due to the significantly smaller sized L2 cache on the processor cores, with each core able to access its own 256 kB of L2 cache. In contrast, the most recent Yorkfields have up to 12 MB of L2 cache. To help compensate, the Core i7 also has a new L3 cache of 8 MB, shared among all four cores, similar to AMD's "Barcelona" processors. This is due to the trend of games making use of more threads, and with hyper-threading (HT) the Core i7 can scale more than 4x faster, such as in cinebench tests. However, more recent testing done on all clock rates of official hardware with final drivers and BIOS revisions show that Core i7 at the very least beats Yorkfield clock-for-clock, and in most cases exceeds it by an average of about 17%. But when it comes to high-end multi-GPU environments (Nvidia 3-way SLI and ATI Crossfire X), the i7 is revealed to be much faster than Yorkfield (QX9770) in clock-for-clock)

[Lemur]

Hay, Caius. It's not unusual for a new architecture's first generation to show little to no gains over the previous one. A lot of the changes are there to support higher clock speeds and optimizations down the line.

So the first generation of I7s score the same or slightly lower at gaming than the CoreWhatevers? Not surprised. But watch out in a year or so, I7s (and their derivative platforms) are going to start spanking the old architecture, no doubt. Just not today.

For somebody buying today, it boils down to a simple question: Spend less now and face a closed upgrade path, or spend more and hope that the hot procs of 2010 and 2011 are compatible with your mobo?

[Caius]

o the first generation of I7s score the same or slightly lower at gaming than the CoreWhatevers? Not surprised. But watch out in a year or so, I7s (and their derivative platforms) are going to start spanking the old architecture, no doubt. Just not today.

Must be that because programs are not prepared for them? Or because those new procesors are new? How much does one cost?

Might as well keep my simple core processor as a relic.