The better performer?

myocardia

Diamond Member
Jun 21, 2003
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While both of these guys are totally right, don't forget that your video card makes much more difference than your processor in every game available now, besides Oblivion to some extent. In other words, if buying an E6600 will force you to buy a vanilla 6600 video card, that won't be upgraded fairly soon, then skip it, and buy an E6300 or E6400, and a much faster video card.
 

harpoon84

Golden Member
Jul 16, 2006
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Originally posted by: myocardia
While both of these guys are totally right, don't forget that your video card makes much more difference than your processor in every game available now, besides Oblivion to some extent. In other words, if buying an E6600 will force you to buy a vanilla 6600 video card, that won't be upgraded fairly soon, then skip it, and buy an E6300 or E6400, and a much faster video card.

I think that rule only really applies to the (majority) of 3D FPS games... and single player ones at that.

http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2795&p=15

Rise of Nations - totally CPU bound. PD 820 gets 34fps vs 120fps for an X6800.

http://firingsquad.com/hardware/intel_core_2_performance/page11.asp
http://firingsquad.com/hardware/intel_core_2_sli_performance/page7.asp

Flight simulators are also very CPU bound.

And I know websites never show this because it can't be 'benchmarked' properly, but online multiplayer games like CS:S, BF2/BF2142 and WoW are also very CPU bound as well as being GPU bound. My XP-M @ 2.5GHz and P4C @ 3.3GHz both struggle with BF2 and CS:S when there are a lot of enemies present or there is a lot of action going on.

Finally, a game I'm playing right now, but probably doesn't get much mention on these forums due to it being US based, is Football Manager 2007 (or Worldwide Soccer Manager 2007 in the US).

It will bring ANY current CPU to it's knees if enough leagues and players are loaded. It also has multithreading support, so it's not like that hasn't been implemented already to improve performance. It really is *the* single most demanding game on CPU resources. Previous versions were the same.

So please, don't assume ALL gamers play single player 3D shoot em ups, there's a whole lot of other games out there. ;)