# Processor vs Video Card



## bigbopper180 (Feb 18, 2014)

Good morning, gents. Thanks to a hefty bonus from work this year, I'll be building a new gaming rig in the next couple weeks, and this is something I've always been curious about.

All of my previous gaming builds have generally had a more expensive processor than video card(s). Something in my brain told me that the processor would need to be high end for a gaming rig. Looking at some builds on pcpartpicker.com, I'm starting to think that assumption was incorrect and that it's better to splurge on the video card instead of the processor. If possible, I'd like some guidance on the subject. Thanks!


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## PD_Lape (Nov 19, 2014)

It actually has to be balanced. If either one is compromised then bottleneck effect will greatly affect the performance of the system.

this vid will explain what it is and how to avoid it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGdo75gasaQ


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## ChantryOntario (Apr 22, 2013)

I've found that it makes a lot of difference what types of game you play. HD/3D shooters, or any 3D game with a hi-res models tend to really eat up video processing power more so than 2D strategy type games. A balance is good to achieve. That being said, I've found that system ram and video card are slightly more important in general than main processor speed. The recent advances in video cards are huge compared to the more modest advances in real usable processor power. 

Getting a 3.8 processor rather than a 3.4 processor is not going to give you the same wow factor that a good mid-range ($200) video card will. Also someone may correct me here, and I hope they do, but there are no games that I know of that will take advantage of a 6,8, or 10 core processor.

System ram is critical , more so in a gaming rig. 4 gigs absolute minimum, with 8 being "normal", and 16 being top end, but offering less increase in performance than say moving from 4-8 would. Ram is relatively cheap, and offers the MOST bang for the buck in terms of all round performance if you also use your gaming rig for other things.. anyway it's a slow day at work, hope this helps a little.


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## jeffnc (Apr 1, 2011)

It's possible to get more actual cores for the dollar with AMD, but Intel and hyperthreading can make for a faster CPU. So it depends very much on the software and which it's optimized for.

According to this post, "Battlefield 3, crysis 3, far cry 3, and skyrim are some off the top of my head that like higher core count or at least utilize a quad core"

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-1625277/multicore-game-support.html

I just built a machine with a 500G solid state drive. In addition to the CPU and RAM recommendations above, I think you'll notice a performance boost with this too, for sure. (i5 4690X, 16G RAM, Radeon R9 270X).


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## ChantryOntario (Apr 22, 2013)

Agree wholeheartedly with the SSD. I loaded my OS and a couple daily programs on the SSD and windows boot time is 8 seconds.... while it doesn't affect my gaming performance much it really helps with overall wait times; anything that has to load a while from the drive.


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## ddawg16 (Aug 15, 2011)

If you are going to do a gaming computer you really want to invest into a good video card. Especially if you are going to run some of the newer video games that take advantage of DirectX. 

A lot of what a video card does is 'moving' (panning) information around the display. This is better done with the hardware acceleration on the video card. Then you have the process of drawing objects. The video card is going to just be faster. 

A multi-core processor might be able to do it, but now you are using the memory buss for some of these tasks and the game program needs to be compiled so as to take advantage of multiple processors.

Buy the video card.
Toss in a good SSD and LOTS of Ram. 16G is a good start. It will reduce the disk access


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## jeffnc (Apr 1, 2011)

jeffnc said:


> (i5 4690X, 16G RAM, Radeon R9 270X).


I meant 4690K of course, the overclockable one. No reason to spend the extra few bucks for the Intel K versions if you're not going to overclock.


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