OT: Computer benchmarks

[Ragnarok-X]

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 ?

[Suicide Junkie]

Personally, I get ~$300 worth of whole new system every 4 or 5 years and it is plenty fast.

How much are you wanting to spend on this?

[Raapys]

Don't think it's worth it just yet. Final quarter of 2007 there will, apparantly, be released new Intel and AMD quad core CPUs( this time a 'real' quad core from Intel ), and the 9xxx line of Nvidia cards is also expected to arrive around that time. Even if you're not planning on buying the latest, they will at least ensure a price drop on existing hardware.

[Fyron]

Your computer is more than sufficient... upgrades at this time would be a colossal waste of money.

Benchmarks are useless.

[Combat Wombat]

Fyron said:
Your computer is more than sufficient... upgrades at this time would be a colossal waste of money.

Benchmarks are useless.

I agree, I see no reason why that computer would need to be upgraded yet.

[Raapys]

By the way, how's processing times with your E6600 ?

I'm stuck with a 3 year old p4 3ghz HT myself, and I've often wondered how much faster the lower clocked new CPUs are, compared.

[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