- Jul 13, 2008
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Part 2: Building A Balanced Gaming PC
Another dude that will play at high resolution but then is worried on what is the fastest processor at low resolutions.
One look at the totals chart for Part 2 and its easy to see that the graphics card will determine what resolution is playable for each game. In fact, these lines are so flat that looking at this chart alone would almost mislead us to believe the CPU has little impact on frame rates at all. This is far from the truth when it comes to outright performance or even the sweet spot of CPU/GPU balance. The fact remains that a $100 CPU does a far better job than a $100 GPU when it comes to maxing out a low resolution like 1280x1024.
While the Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition was sufficient to play all seven games, the Radeon HD 4850 was only powerful enough to push our ambitious levels of detail and AA in two of these titles. This doesnt make the Radeon HD 4850 a bad gaming card, it just means settings will need to be adjusted down to find the desired compromise between performance and image quality.
Another dude that will play at high resolution but then is worried on what is the fastest processor at low resolutions.