OT: Computer benchmarks

[Baron Munchausen]

Ragnarok-X said:
hey there,

my computer has a 7900GT and n E6600 cpu. Its about one year now. I was wondering about potential upgrades on those 2 thingies and therefor was looking for online benchmarks or comparions. Do you have a good site with constant tech-updates/reviews etc ?

Good god... do you realize that I am reading this on an Asus A7V133 with a 1.2 Ghz Duron and a mere Matrox G450 video card? Yes, a six year old computer. It works fine.

Do you NEED the extra power for some reason? Unless you know you need the upgrade to run something specific, I'd say just relax for a couple more years.

[Ragnarok-X]

Well i dont EXACTLY need better performance. I figured i might get a new GPU March/April 2008 for Crysis or some other game.

Initially i wanted to get a rough feeling about how much faster todays high-end CPUs and GPUs are, relative to mine which were high-end when i bought the system.

[Fyron]

Rather negligibly in general. 5-10% performance gains are not worth $500-1000. Isn't the only real difference between the geforce 7xxx line and 8xxx line DX10 support? Maybe some marginally faster speeds on various components? DX10 support matters naught if you don't upgrade to Vista, and is only relevant for 2 or 3 games so (including titles in the works).

Your core 2 duo E6600 is still way up there in processing capacity. The newer CPUs have only gained a few percentage points in frequency. I doubt going from an e6600 (2.4 ghz) to an e6750 (2.66 ghz) or e6850 (3 ghz) would result in much difference in actual game performance. Quad core CPUs are almost entirely snake oil at this point (outside of servers and massively parallel data processing applications); IIRC only 1 game actually makes use of more than 2 cores. Going from dual core to quad core will result in worse performance for the vast majority of games and software you will use over the next year or two, or at best no net gain.

Benchmarks will have bigger useless numbers, but real world performance doesn't scale so nicely. Don't buy new hardware unless games (you have already bought) actually start to have performance issues. Its a very slippery slope (approaching frictionless) to start upon.

[Raapys]

Hmm, a e6850 (300$ on Newegg) might be worth it if you also overclock it to 3.3-3.5ghz. That'll give you the best performance possible today, except in applications that support quad core( which are still very few ). 8xxx line is mainly for DX10 as Fyron says, although there is some performance increase too.

Here's a user-made test you can have a look at, comparing your card to the 8800GTS 320mb.

http://www.bjorn3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=13355

[Ragnarok-X]

Thanks for your thoughts.
I almost forgot than i can overcloak my stuff lol. So, before i get new components, i will use the various tools to get a slightly better performance, should it be needed.

[AstralWanderer]

Baron Munchausen reminisced:
Good god... do you realize that I am reading this on an Asus A7V133 with a 1.2 Ghz Duron and a mere Matrox G450 video card? Yes, a six year old computer. It works fine.

Hah! I'm making this post using a hundred-year old abacus, where you have to arrange the beads to form the ASCII values for each character - including the brackets for HTML tags.

(Disclaimer: Not really, using a 7-year old 1Ghz PIII laptop with a Geforge2Go 32MB graphics card - runs SEV OK generally though).

Fyron quoteth:
Isn't the only real difference between the geforce 7xxx line and 8xxx line DX10 support? Maybe some marginally faster speeds on various components? DX10 support matters naught if you don't upgrade to Vista, and is only relevant for 2 or 3 games so (including titles in the works).

The top end (8800) cards offer a more significant speed boost, comparable to a couple of 7800/7900's in SLI plus improvements to image quality (e.g. the ability to use High Dynamic Range lighting with anti-aliasing enabled which the 7xxx series can't do). Mid-range (8600/8400) cards apparently perform worse than the previous generation though (as do their ATI equivalents) making the 7900/X1900 series the better choice for medium level systems.

However whether an upgrade is a good idea or not depends on what you are using your system for. If you have a large monitor for instance and want to run a graphically demanding game (e.g. Oblivion, Stalker) with good quality settings, then a graphics upgrade may be worthwhile - but for a future game, it would make more sense to wait until after it's launched (prices will be lower, more details on what the game needs will be available).

As for CPUs, a highly overclockable quad-core (e.g. G0 stepping of the Q6600) should provide more power in theory, but the reality will depend on what you run and how much concurrency you really need.

As for benchmarks, ones using the games you play are going to be the most important. There are synthetic benchmarks aplenty though (e.g. Sandra, 3DMark) if you want to give those a spin...