CPU vs GPU limited?

T

tybert7

2[H]4U
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Aug 23, 2007
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I have a question about my potential upgrade paths.


I built this system about a year and a half ago, with moderate but decent components. In particular the card I have in now is the x1800 gto, which was a midrange card at the time, and an AMD Opteron 170 as my cpu. The clock speeds are about on par with the ENTRY level AMD dual core at the time, the 3800+, with about twice the l2 cache size for the "server class" processor. And I worry about that. I can upgrade a card easily enough, and intend to, but at what point do games become cpu limited to a noticeable degree?

I have 3 gigs of ram in this system, to get a new class of cpu I would have to chuck the motherboard, ALL the ram, and STILL get a newer card for the newer games.


Can I get by with newer games even with this slightly dated processor? It is still a great processor, but is it still good enough? Most of the time games seem gpu limited, but hopefully someone more knowledgeable can go into more detail for my benefit.
 
I have an Opteron 185 with 2 gigs of RAM. I'm not sure how close that is spec-wise to a 170, but I'm sure there are plenty of folks who think the any 939 chip is "insufficient".

Regardless, I got my 8800GT and can play Crysis with every setting on "Very High" (edit Cvars files - I'm still using WinXP) at 1280x800 w/ 4x AA smoothly and with no problems. Well, except for the ending on the ship - I got some stutter, so I dropped the textures to "High" and shadows to "High" and that solved the problem.

I also played the COD4 and Bioshock demos with all settings maxed, again at 1280 x 800, and they played uber-smoothly.

Hopefully, this helps!
 
The 170 should be fine, but you're not running it at stock speed are you? Dual-core 939s overclock a long way - I've had my 170 at 2.6Ghz on the stock cooler for nearly two years and that's a fairly low clock given what some here have achieved. Leaving it at the stock 2Ghz is just nonsensical.
 
JDAdams said:
The 170 should be fine, but you're not running it at stock speed are you? Dual-core 939s overclock a long way - I've had my 170 at 2.6Ghz on the stock cooler for nearly two years and that's a fairly low clock given what some here have achieved. Leaving it at the stock 2Ghz is just nonsensical.
Click to expand...

Actually, I am, one of the reasons I got this one in the first place was the overclocking potential, but the stock speeds gave me no trouble so there I left it.


If I do start to see some slowdown though I will overclock to give my system a last second wind.
 
In that case I'd pick up a better card first, and then O/C if you don't get the expected improvement. I overclocked mine as I wasn't happy with the performance from two X1900s at stock speeds, speeding up the CPU gave a nice boost.
 
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