Gamers: Do You Need More Than An Athlon II X3?

[GaiaHunter]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/athlon-ii-x3-440-gaming-performance,2619.html

To summarize, the Athlon II X3 440 is an excellent budget gaming processor for single graphics card applications, and probably represents the best price/performance value we've seen to date. But for folks with more cash who are looking for greater performance out of their gaming system (particularly when using multi-card graphics configurations or CPU-intensive game titles) ,higher-end CPUs are definitely a viable option. Remember that the name of the game here is balance. As you scale up graphics muscle, adding the processing horsepower to match will yield an optimal balance between the two subsystems.

Guess this could be in CPUs but it is related to matching GPUs and graphics.

EDIT: looks like I posted in CPUs afteral...

 

[veri745]

Very interesting article. If you keep the price difference in mind while reading, it really becomes clear how far budget gaming CPUs have come.

 

[A_Dying_Wren]

Not if you want to game well on rts games though. Even in WiC the x3 gets hammered.

 

[Reincus]

The x3 wasn't unlocked/overclocked either, so you can get even more bang for your buck.

 

[BD231]

We've received some feedback on the forums suggesting that our recommendation of any processor more expensive than the Athlon II X3 440 is frivolous.

I knew there was no reason for an article on this topic. Don't bend to the will of douchbags Tom, they don't know any better.

 

[v8envy]

Bogus tests. No FSAA? Low resolution? Obscene frame rates? Really?

Crank up the FSAA and suddenly the results at 1680x1050 and 1080p will look a lot like the 2500x1600 results. And at higher resolutions it's pretty darn obvious the $90 cpu is more than good enough. Same thing goes for eyefinity resolutions.

Yes, if you want obscenely high frame rates at low resolution with no AA an OCd i7 is the only way to fly. But for your average Joe wanting maximal eye candy the triple core is plenty. You don't have to have a 30" monitor to be fine with a low end CPU. Even at mainstream resolutions you can easily move the bottleneck to the video card by cranking settings.

Oh, and those CPUs routinely overclock to 3.4-3.8 ghz on stock volts. That might change the picture even more.

 

[HumblePie]

Interesting article, but it basically is stating to match your CPU with your GPU based your expected gaming demand.

Meaning that if you gaming at low resolutions than a cheap multicore AMD cpu with a 5850 is all you need.

If you are gaming as massive resolutions with high levels of AA then you need to speed the big bucks to get the performance needed for quality gaming.


Err, those previous two statement have always held true. Don't really see the need for this article.

 

[BD231]

Bogus tests. No FSAA? Low resolution? Obscene frame rates? Really?

Crank up the FSAA and suddenly the results at 1680x1050 and 1080p will look a lot like the 2500x1600 results. And at higher resolutions it's pretty darn obvious the $90 cpu is more than good enough. Same thing goes for eyefinity resolutions.

Yes, if you want obscenely high frame rates at low resolution with no AA an OCd i7 is the only way to fly. But for your average Joe wanting maximal eye candy the triple core is plenty. You don't have to have a 30" monitor to be fine with a low end CPU. Even at mainstream resolutions you can easily move the bottleneck to the video card by cranking settings.

Oh, and those CPUs routinely overclock to 3.4-3.8 ghz on stock volts. That might change the picture even more.

The point is that we've known x3's were a great gaming CPU long before the Athlon II showed up. When value parts started becoming less inherently crippled via cache and hitting 3ghz, yeah, applications that shine under higher clocks got a healthy boost.

It's a modern multi-core part pushing 3ghz .... I would seriously hope I didn't need much more than that to play a game.

 

[GaiaHunter]

Interesting article, but it basically is stating to match your CPU with your GPU based your expected gaming demand.

Meaning that if you gaming at low resolutions than a cheap multicore AMD cpu with a 5850 is all you need.

If you are gaming as massive resolutions with high levels of AA then you need to speed the big bucks to get the performance needed for quality gaming.


Err, those previous two statement have always held true. Don't really see the need for this article.

I think basically what you can see is that if gaming is the use you give to ur PC there is hardly any justification to get a high end CPU, except for pure wanting/can, although they just don't say it - I bet some people would dislike.

The $200+ difference can easily get you a 60-80GB SSD or better mouse/spakers/headphones/keyboard/game controllers/dozens of game/a couple of years of MMORPG, a GPU upgrade in 6 months, etc.

Or simply reduce the entry price of a gaming machine to $500.

 

[classy]

I think this article just confirms what many gamers already knew. Benchmarks don't always mean a good gaming experience. Now they are important, but we have come so far with cpu horsepower that in only small segements will the more powerful cpus display a marked difference.

 

[Rubycon]

We've received some feedback on the forums suggesting that our recommendation of any processor more expensive than the Athlon II X3 440 is frivolous.

I knew there was no reason for an article on this topic. Don't bend to the will of douchbags Tom, they don't know any better.

They all play solitaire and bejeweled just fine, thank you!

 

[LoneNinja]

They all play solitaire and bejeweled just fine, thank you!

They also all play starcraft just fine, lol

 

[FragKrag]

I won't buy it if it can't play StarCraft! :>

I found the article quite interesting, but it does just reaffirms what many people already know.

 

[0roo0roo]

assuming you don't run anything else while gaming sure.
and yea, only with budget graphics.

 

[Deleted member 4644]

My experience for the last several years is that my games have ALL been GPU limited. I have run mid to high end cpus (my last was a stock speed Q6700, currently upgrading to i7). I have never been CPU limited from what I can tell.

This is at 1900x1200.

 

[0roo0roo]

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/cpus-and-games-2010_2.html#sect0
depends on your gpu, cuz look there... i7 still gets advantage over i5

 

[soccerballtux]

L3 cache still best for combating minimum frames.

 

[A_Dying_Wren]

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/cpus-and-games-2010_2.html#sect0
depends on your gpu, cuz look there... i7 still gets advantage over i5

Well duh. 3.3GHz>2.66GHz. That article is fairly useless though. They should either give a decent clock for clock comparison or a comparison of both chips clocked to their realistic maximum.

 

[0roo0roo]

i'm just saying the games aren't gpu limited