E6600 + 7950

aeonrevolution

aeonrevolution

2[H]4U
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Aug 30, 2004
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I'm in the midst of piecing together a new desktop and went ahead and jumped on the Amazon Sapphire 7950 for $265 since I was going to get that anyways.

I'm just curious how bad I'll be bottlenecked until I get the rest of the new computer.

E6600 @ 2.8ghz
3gb memory (don't ask :mad: )
And some old ass hard drives :D
 
The problem is that the E6600 runs at such a low clock rate, but with a bit of overclocking that can change; but I highly doubt the PCI-express bus on your p35(?) board can supply enough bandwidth to keep this graphics system at 100% usage on any front...

Also, are you running XP? because 32 bit OSes don't like video cards larger than 1gb as they take up the CPU's RAM register space.
 
kinda funny that on amd's page they recommend 4gb of ram for the 7950 vs 1gb on a 6950....
tell us how it performs as i m interested on how it performs with less than 4gb on a p35
 
I have WIndows 7 64 bit. I did the free shipping so it will be a bit til I can report back.
 
maboblivion said:
kinda funny that on amd's page they recommend 4gb of ram for the 7950 vs 1gb on a 6950....
tell us how it performs as i m interested on how it performs with less than 4gb on a p35
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I highly doubt his RAM amount will be the bottleneck in this situation.
 
I have an E6600 stock with a 7970 running at 1680x1050. Epic bottleneck. You can crank the settings as high as you want but your frame rates won't change. At least not in my experience. Borderlands is smooth. Battlefield 3 is pretty smooth but can lag in a massive firefight. It's annoying but I was holding out for Haswell.

PS - I have 8 GB but it never all gets used unless I'm shopping for a Haswell system and I've got an insane number of tabs open in Chrome.
 
the bottleneck will be laughably bad. that cpu is not only going to cut what a 7950 can do in half but its also a playable limitation in general for some games. in other words if you try to run decent settings you are likely to have sub 30 fps averages in some of the more cpu demanding games. why do you really care if you are in the process of upgrading everything anyway?
 
what motherboard do you have? can you upgrade processor? i went from a e6700 overclocked at 3.6 to a q9550 overclocked at 3.9 with a gtx 650 ti and everything runs great for me.
 
I don't really care. Was just curious. I'm waiting for the 3770k's to get back in stock at microcenter to continue building the new dekstop.

The current (old) motherboard is a p5ne-sli.
 
hypertek said:
what motherboard do you have? can you upgrade processor? i went from a e6700 overclocked at 3.6 to a q9550 overclocked at 3.9 with a gtx 650 ti and everything runs great for me.
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a 7950 is nearly twice as fast as a 650 ti so he might as well get a more modern quad core at this point.
 
crazy enough I still see cpu limited areas in some games even with my 2500k oced to 4.4. I feel sorry for anyone that buys a 120 or 144hz screen thinking all they have to do is throw gpu power at it to maintain 120 or 144 fps. that is never going to happen in all games until we get a massive increase in cpu power. sadly Haswell is not it.
 
You need the Gigabyte P965 chipset as my old retired e6600 would do 3.4Gz on that board, the e5200 would do 4.0Ghz on the same board as it has bios settings to help boost the PCI Express 16x slot close to 2.0
 
get that e6600 upto 3.6ghz ASAP add a hyper 212 evo set voltage to 1.45 and 400 fsb
 
You guys arent reading my posts lol. I'm in the middle of building a new computer, I was just curious what to expect as the 7950 is the first part I bought and I'm just gonna throw it in my old computer in the mean time.
 
I have an Athlon X2 4400+ @~2.7Ghz paired with a GTX 580. Definitely bottlenecked, but it all depends on the game. For benchmarks, Unigine Heaven still seems to max the GPU, while the Valley benchmark only gets to about 50% while pegging both CPU cores at 100%.

Tomb Raider: Runs surprisingly well, all settings up including TressFX @ 1080p. Some slowdowns here and there, but it's actually pretty playable for me. Some spots definitely drop below 30 FPS, but I've always been accustomed to having drops here and there, never always had the latest in PC hardware.

Batman Arkham City: Huge bottleneck. Settings can be turned all the way up with PhysX or to medium and I get the same FPS. Some areas are playable, way over 30 FPS, but then some areas become a bit of a slideshow, and in areas you wouldn't expect. The Catwoman section where you break into the vault runs super slow, I guess the AI henchmen are thinking extra hard. Surprising since it's a small room, not an open city landscape.

Give it a try with your E6600, if anything, you'll get to see which of your games are more CPU limited, and as a plus, you'll appreciate your new CPU all the more so :D
 
why would you put a gtx580 with an old Ahlon X2? you are not even getting half of what that gpu can do plus that cpu is a limitation in general for most newer games. you would have a better gaming experience with a gtx560 and modern cpu for less money.
 
cannondale06 said:
why would you put a gtx580 with an old Ahlon X2? you are not even getting half of what that gpu can do plus that cpu is a limitation in general for most newer games. you would have a better gaming experience with a gtx560 and modern cpu for less money.
Click to expand...

I got the CPU/mobo/ram/GPU combo from a friend for very cheap, and the GTX 580 from another friend for very cheap (MSI Lightning 3gb model for $125). I'm planning on upgrading the CPU/mobo/RAM pretty soon, so it won't be so off balanced, but it's not like I planned putting this together to be a powerhouse machine, I just got back into desktop computers after having work laptops with mid to high range video cards for the last 4 or 5 years.

Not sure why I felt the need to explain all that to you, but there you go :)
 
Citizen86 said:
I got the CPU/mobo/ram/GPU combo from a friend for very cheap, and the GTX 580 from another friend for very cheap (MSI Lightning 3gb model for $125). I'm planning on upgrading the CPU/mobo/RAM pretty soon, so it won't be so off balanced, but it's not like I planned putting this together to be a powerhouse machine, I just got back into desktop computers after having work laptops with mid to high range video cards for the last 4 or 5 years.

Not sure why I felt the need to explain all that to you, but there you go :)
Click to expand...
well of course it makes sense to explain why you did that because it seems really silly without a good reason. your friend must be very nice or either clueless about prices to sell you a gtx580 for just 125 bucks. anyway hurry up and get you a modern quad core so you can actually enjoy playing games properly with that gtx580. ;)
 
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