Question Matching video card for Core i7-2600 (3.4G .......

winr

Diamond Member
Feb 17, 2001
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What would be a good matching video card for Core i7-2600 (3.4G please ??

New to me bios type stumped me .. lol ... clicked something and cpu was running 4000 something on a Sabretooth Z77 .... only got a tiny bit warmer



Phenom II and 750 Ti will now become 2nd PC...



Ricky.
 

GodisanAtheist

Diamond Member
Nov 16, 2006
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Eh, really depends on what you're willing to spend and and what the rest of your components (mainly Power Supply) look like.

My MO is to always buy as much as I can afford in a GPU, cause you can always turn up stuff that improves image quality and keep your FPS with a powerful GPU (shift the load from the CPU to the GPU). One day when you upgrade your CPU/mobo/RAM you just get a higher FPS ceiling.
 
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Shmee

Memory & Storage, Graphics Cards Mod Elite Member
Super Moderator
Sep 13, 2008
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What games do you plan on playing, and at what resolution? Obviously a higher resolution will be more GPU bound. I agree in general that for an 4c8t CPU, something like a 1660 super is about tops.
 

SteveGrabowski

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Oct 20, 2014
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These days I would guess a 2600k should play most games at 50-60 fps, so as long as you have a FreeSync monitor it should offer a decent gaming experience for a while with a video card that supports FreeSync and has enough horsepower to go 50-60 fps at whatever resolution you want to play at. Eg GTX 1070 or better for 1080p assuming you want to play at high settings. I guess that because I still run a two generations newer 4C/8T Xeon E3-1231v3 chip (like an i7-4790 but without an igpu) and it can game at mostly around 60 fps these days. And I don't recall there being any enormous gains in IPC between second and fourth gen Core architecture.

Though Cyberpunk is a real canary in the coal mine hinting that quadcores probably won't get the job done at 60 fps in the near future, considering you have to drop down to medium settings to really get near 60 fps in it with newer quadcores much less 10 year old quads (or the 7 year-old quad I'm running).
 
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SteveGrabowski

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Oct 20, 2014
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I remember seeing RDR 2 GPU-scaling/CPU-scaling videos on YT, and a GTX 1660 maxed out with around a Skylake i5-6500 quad-core. So that would basically be a ceiling for you.

I thought RDR2 liked having the extra threads. I was always, I mean 100% of the time with no exception I ever found, gpu bound in it with a GTX 1660 Super and 4C/8T Xeon E3-1231v3 (from 2014) at 1080p using the recommended settings from Hardware Unboxed for the game, and I probably played that game for at least 200 hours. There is no part of the map I didn't go to, no hunt I didn't do, no side mission, no stone unturned in that game AFAIK and I never not once found myself cpu bound at any single point of the game. And the Xeon E3-1231v3 is nothing special, just an i7-4790 non-K minus 200 MHz, minus the igpu, with ECC memory support, and marketed as a low end server processor instead of the upper midrange gaming cpu the i7-4790 was at the time AFAIK. Still, great buy for the $250 I spent for it back in 2014 considering it's still kind of ok in late 2021.
 
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AnitaPeterson

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Apr 24, 2001
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Honestly, considering the state of the market, I wouldn't even go for something expensive.
My advice? Go for a GTX1650 with DDR6 and wait until this bitcoin craze crashes and burns.
Unless you play at crazy resolutions, I don't think you'll find games it can't run.
 
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VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
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God that's a depressing video. GTX 960 for $200 felt like a joke in 2015 and now it really feels perverse only a couple of months out from 2022.
Yeah, yeah, I know. :(

750ti in 2021, as a reasonable and viable option for 1080P (what these days, "Low" settings?), is something that I wouldn't have foreseen. At least now, you can get them in 4GB varieties.
 
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VirtualLarry

No Lifer
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Asus dual-fan GTX 1650 4GB GDDR6 OC version, $269.99 + $3.99 ship, HURRY!
 
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