What speed cpu would be overkill for a Voodoo 3 3000??

[KennyH]

I am going to be putting a cheap Duron rig together and was wondering what speed cpu would be at a point of diminishing returns for this 'ol Voodoo 3 I have here. Any help is appreciated

 

[Mavrick007]

I would say what games would make it's time numbered cause you could put it with any cpu and play any game made a year or so ago great. If you're trying to make a good current gaming rig, then you don't want to use a 16Meg Voodoo 3 card.

 

[merlocka]

It depends.

At high resolutions, the V3 will be fillrate limited with even the slowest CPU's. At low resolution it would depend on which game you are running. For a Quake3 era game, at 640x480 a V3 3000 topped out at about 100fps. I would guess that a duron 800+ would get you 90% of the card's performance even at the lowest resolutions.

 

[PCHPlayer]

A while back (8 months or so) I believe Tom's Hardware had an article about diminishing returns on CPU speed. Back then once you hit about 900Mhz the CPU was no longer the bottleneck. Since the Voodoo 3 is much older than that I would say you are going to max that thing out with about any Duron you can buy. You might as well get the fastest you can afford and go for a new video card when more cash is available.

Edit
Here are the articles at Tom's. Pentium III and AMD.

 

[Goi]

The Voodoo3 3000 scales surprisingly well. I upgraded from a C300@504MHz to a C566@850 and I saw a dramatic improvement. Never tried it with faster CPUs though, but I guess a Duron 800+MHz would be a good match for it. Don't expect to play current games at high graphical settings at high frame rate though. Q3A/UT is about as new a game as you can playwith decent framerates/graphical settings. RtCW will likely crawl, as does mine, at anything higher than 640x480.