Toms Hardware Answer's the Gadzillion dollar Question: GPU or CPU?

Toms Hardware Answer's the Gadzillion dollar Question: GPU or CPU?

the link is here:

GPU vs CPU Upgrade

The question being: What has a greater impact on performance. A cpu upgrade or a gpu upgrade.

This is a very well written article, perhaps it is the best best article at THG since their review of the T-Bird Athlon.

the
test includes 6,7,8 and 9 series nvidia cards, along with dual and quad
core intel cpu's. both gpu's and cpu's come in standard and oc'd flavours.


The brief:
going from a 6800GT to a 9800GTX gets u a gain of about 500%
going from a E2160 to a Q6600 (3.2) gets u a gain of about 135%
(100% being baseline in both tests)

the article goes beyond this 'simple' comparison and shows how gpu's scale with increasing cpu power.

(a 9800GTX goes from a base score of 100% on a e2160 to a 143% with a Q6600 (3.2))

the reverse of the above is probably what gives the clearer picture. how a cpu scales with increasing gfx power
(a e2160 goes from a base score of 100% with a 6800GT to 436% with a 9800gtx)

the article has more benchmarks that would satisfy anyone who loves crunching data.

this includes COd4, Crysis and Area 51 Blacksite.


the
article concludes that getting a better gpu is better than getting a
better cpu... that being said, the cpu must have sufficient baseline power
to feed a powerful gpu (which the article also points out).