clockspeed question...

[crowland2]

My son is looking into building his own "gaming" computer--on somewhat of a budget. On the computer building site we're looking at it says that you want the "clockspeed" of the processor and the graphics card to be as similar as possible, so that information passing through the processor and into the graphics card can move smoothly. The only specs that are remotely similar in both the recommended processor and the recommended graphics card are the Processor's FSB and the graphics card's "memory clock" both stated at 1GHz.

Here are the processor specs- http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...33#DetailSpecs. Here are the graphics card specs - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...89#DetailSpecs .

Can anyone help clarify this for us? Thanks!

[David Harrison]

I've never heard that before, seems to be somewhat duff advice to me. My graphics card runs ar 425MHz and my CPU runs at 2.2GHz, they're fairly far apart.

It doesn't matter what processor you get with which graphics card, you could have an AMD Athlon 64 4000+ CPU with a Voodoo 3 2000 16MB PCI graphics card if you wanted. I know that for a fact because at one point I had a someone's system running with exactly that setup as a temporary solution until a new graphics card arrived (their old one broke).

As long as the graphics card is compatible with the motherboard (ie: they're both either PCI-E or AGP), then you won't have any trouble.

Edit: One thing I would recommend though is that you get a BFG 7800GT instead of the MSI 7800GT, MSI are a good brand but BFG offer a manufacturers lifetime warranty on their graphics cards.

[offsider]

According to your specs you should have no problem running the gaming PC as long as you have enough RAM
You have not mentioned how much RAM you are going to use. Remember, a 256Mb Graphics Card will use 256Mb of your RAM so at least 500Mb or better
1Gig of RAM would be advisable

[David Harrison]

Um ... no. A graphics card with 256MB of RAM has 256MB of RAM on the graphics card itself, it doesn't use the system RAM at all.

However, I would also recommend 1GB of RAM, specifically this RAM. In my opinion I feel that less than 1GB is too little, but more than 1GB is excessive and more can always be bought at a later date if required.

[crowland2]

Thanks for the responses. I'll pass this on to my son and let him "digest" it. By the way, at this point we were planning to put 1 Gig Ram, but the mother board is expandable to 4 Gig.

[judge john]

Normally 1GB of RAM would be fine but i think you can do far better. a 7800GT is one hell of a powerful card. this leads me to believe you first have some money and second are panning on some serious gaming. in this case there is no point at deciding to be cheap on RAM when it's one of the cheapest things anyway. if you want to run the latest games like FEAR, BF2 etc on top settings then you will need 1.5Gb and 2GB is recommended by the developers.
Also you say he is building it on a budget. Well I would strongly advise you not to go down the road of spending all your money on the likes of a 7800GT and then buying a load of other crap parts. Because your just wasting the money on the 7800GT as the system will get bottle-necked elsewhere. So make sure you get the parts to back up the gfx.

[liam858]

There's no need to match GFX Card clock with CPU clock, if you did want to there would either be a bottleneck in the system, or a hole in your bank balance, as you could get a high end CPU that is clocked at 2Ghz stock and 2 x 7800GTX's which would equal 2Ghz clock, but would set you back a lot of cash.....FSB would not affect graphics, and there's no need to match a 1Ghz(Most likely 1066Mhz) FSB to a graphics card either.

I'm not a fan of Nvidia personally, but as you can see everyone else who has replied prefers them so i'm outnumbered at the moment....my preference would be a Sapphire ATI Radeon X1800 XT 512MB GDDR3 AVIVO TV-Out/Dual DVI.


Liam

[crowland2]

Actually, I want him to use a video card we already have for now (GEforcefx 5200). But, we want to make sure it's upgradable to this other video card in the future. Since its our money, he wants a better card, but I want to see how the one we have works with the game he's currently playing (World of Warcraft). Thanks.

[liam858]

Well, that will be an AGP card, so you can upgrade to another AGP card in future, quite honestly though, i think it may struggle on WOW.


Liam

[David Harrison]

To upgrade to his 7800GT at a later date, you'll need a PCI-E motherboard. The best solution would be to get a 6600 or a 6600GT, the 6600's are around $100 on newegg and the 6600GT's are a bit more, but he could get a second at a later date and run them in SLi mode as an alternative to the 7800GT (although even two 6600GT's wouldn't approach the performance of a 7800GT).