Quote:
Originally Posted by LenMiyata  Grumble Grumble Grumble
For most systems, a SLI pair of 880GTX would be a waste of power and $$$. Running at 1080P, you can play all but the bleeding edge graphics games at Max settings. And if you want bleeding edge graphics at that resolution, you'd be better off maximizing your CPU speed, and RAM size & speed first. (And even then, the next generation of graphics cards are only a month or two away, which may be a cheaper performance upgrade route...) |
That is a tricky road there. What you want to get is relative to what you have. Most systems actually see a better performance increase with a higher end graphics card, but that is assuming that "most systems" contain at least a 2.4-2.6 ghz CPU, min spec. Tom's hardware actually just ran a story on this exact question, and their results did sway towards a graphics card purchase for the best overall performance increase, but only if your rig had at lease a 2.4ghz chip or a overclocked E2160 as a minimum spec. That was, according to their reports, because anything lower could not feed a high end graphics card fast enough--thus becoming a bottleneck. At the same time, they were saying that geforce 6 & 7 series should no longer be in any consideration for gaming (they said that more or less. I'm taking liberties in paraphrasing). In my opinion, anything less than an 8600 is a joke with some of the newer games.
In any case, there is a lot to be said about properly tuning your rig. I've seen people get great performance out of mid-level components by simply matching 1:1 clock speeds with FSB and ram. Instead of trying to get 1200 ram sticks, just get 800 and match 1:1 FSB @ a lower multiplier on a stock 2.4ghz chip. Just remember to get a good heatsink.