Gaming PC whats more important?

[Kouen]

Whats most important for a gaming PC

Cpu Speed/power
GPU Power/memory
Amount of Ram

Which of these is more important and in which order?
If you dont mind can you please explain why one is more important than the other

Thx!

GPU - Usually the most used during a game session and the typical bottleneck
the other 2 I find equal really but 2gb is aright but I personally Prefer 4gb and CPU isn't usually too much of a worry I was running games sweet on a E4600 (2.4ghz Dual core), some games however are more cpu dependent but I do find that kinda rare

I Run games Rather sweet on this setup

E6300 Pentium Dual Core
ATi HD4870
4Gb DDR2 800 Ram
X-Fi Xtreme Gamer (Not really needed but nice to have in some OpenAL Games)
1.5tb Seagate 7200.11
600W OCZ StealthXtreme

 

[Zacharine]

GPU, then equally RAM and CPU.

CPUs are the most expensive afaik, therefore the ones you need to invest in the most.

*Falls over laughing*

Top three performers for gaming in GPUs and CPUs, and prices.

Radeon HD 5850, ~320 US dollars.
Radeon HD 5870, >400 US dollars.
Radeon HD 5970 2GB, ~600 US dollars or more, when available at all.
CrossFire/SLi-setup: 2x the price of single card.

CPUs:
Core i5-750 ~200 dollars
Core i7-920 ~290 dollars.
"Intel's Core i7 has proven itself to be the most powerful gaming CPU option available, based on the data we have gathered. The Core i7-920 is a great choice for systems coupled with multiple graphics cards in an SLI or CrossFire configuration. " - TomsHardware

Core i7-975 Extreme ~1k US dollars

"This is the big kahuna, the fastest gaming CPU currently available for purchase, as our game tests show. Is it worth $1,000? If you have money growing on trees, are afraid to try to overclock the Core i7-920, want the ease of overclocking that the Extreme Edition's unlocked multiplier provides, and are willing to pay for the bragging rights, then it just might be.

Otherwise, the Core i7-975 Extreme is a hard sell from a value standpoint; you'd be better off investing more in graphics or solid state storage." - Tomshardware

 

[sephiroth1991]

You want everythink good so you can play the best games, its all a team effort from all parts.

 

[DazZ.]

Different games are more reliant on different components, you'll need an equal spec along the montherboard or you'll bottleneck and whatever you spent loads on won't run as it should.

I'd say CPU is most important, but there isn't really something that's "most important", everything needs everything else.

Why do you want an order? I'd be worried you were going to bottleneck your PC if I cared.

 

[o_O]

Ya want everything as balanced as possible. There is no "best" to be honest, because if you jack one side too high, the other two are gonna bottleneck the whole damn thing. Then what? Looks like that $500 vid card does jack for you since that single core processor and 2 gigs of RAM is slowing everything down now. Spread the funds out among the three, though RAM *can* be neglected a bit; it just makes loading (not rendering or processing) times longer.

Seriously, if you're building this first incarnation, buy it all at once. Don't buy in pieces. And really, buy one or two steps down from bleeding edge tech. Prices of the best stuff plummet as soon as newer stuff comes out, and it just keeps falling as other things come out.

Remember that you tend to replace the processor and motherboard at the same time, processor sockets and chipsets changing all the time and all, so compatibility with old/new stuff is a *****. So try to put off replacing either until you need to replace everything else too.

 

[Woodsey]

If one's particularly weak the others will be dragged down with it.

For gaming, the GPU is most important though.

 

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

There seems to be some disagreement in this thread on whether the CPU or GPU is more important. Something that can affect that is what resolution your monitor is. You can run nearly everything maxed out on a relatively cheap video card if it's only at 1280x1024 or something low like that, but at 1920x1200, you need a much burlier card to handle the same things. I run stuff at high resolution and have never, ever been CPU-limited in a game in the past few years. Not even once. It's always the GPU that ends up determining what settings I can use (except occasionally in some emulators, but those have very backwards hardware requirements compared to native games).

And of course just like everyone else says, just get 4GB of RAM, and that'll solve that problem and let you worry about what to do with the CPU/GPU instead.

 

[Earthmonger]

Graphics card (1GB memory is enough)
CPU
Hard drive, or more specifically, SSD

With a fast processor and GPU, system ram isn't all that important.

 

[Snork Maiden]

Ya want everything as balanced as possible. There is no "best" to be honest, because if you jack one side too high, the other two are gonna bottleneck the whole damn thing. Then what? Looks like that $500 vid card does jack for you since that single core processor and 2 gigs of RAM is slowing everything down now. Spread the funds out among the three, though RAM *can* be neglected a bit; it just makes loading (not rendering or processing) times longer.

Seriously, if you're building this first incarnation, buy it all at once. Don't buy in pieces. And really, buy one or two steps down from bleeding edge tech. Prices of the best stuff plummet as soon as newer stuff comes out, and it just keeps falling as other things come out.

RAM shouldn't be neglected, though, since its dirt cheap. Otherwise this is generally my strategy. I am aiming to keep the MoBo/Proccesor for quite a while though and just change out the GPU at some point (this is the first PC I bought myself). Depending on how long my current proccesor holds up the new GPU might get shipped onto a new MoBo when I upgrade that, or it might be a full upgrade again.

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

You need a good balance of everything you wouldn't open a new bar and cheap out on the shelves would you? What happens is if one thing is bad the others will get dragged down so what you really want is something that is a good all rounder and you'll do fine.

 

[Auric]

GPU
CPU
RAM

 

[Delusibeta]

Just a note: compared to graphics cards, processors are a pain in the ass to upgrade. I would recommend spending a large chunk of your inital money on the processor so you don't have to upgrade it for a few years. If you wind up with a cruddy graphics card as a result, just save up some money and swap it out.

 

[LogieBear]

They are equal, its like the triangle of a gaming P.C
All three are required really

 

[saejox]

CPU, GPU, RAM.
CPU boosts your computer in every aspect. not just gaming.

 

[Treblaine]

They are equal, its like the triangle of a gaming P.C
All three are required really

A better analogy I think is a tube (series of tubes!) no just a tube where you have to have a lot of data flowing freely for it all to be moving fast enough to get high framerates.

If any one section of the tube is too narrow that would be a "bottleneck" in the system and the added advantage of this is that in computing that is exactly what it is called:

Q: "Aww, why is my Source engine game stuttering when I'm running an 8800 GTS at only 1280x1024"
A: "your system has a bottleneck with your 3GHz Pentium 4"


To the OP:
All the data needs to be handed around your system with ease. And it isn't just speed but bandwidth too, you need adequate memory caches all along the chain or the system will be forced to do things by halves or quarters or may not be able to do them at all.

So the questions is not "what can I scrimp on" but "What do I HAVE to get right on a first build/buy"

And I'd say that is the CPU- and by extension, the motherboard. See upgrading the RAM and GPU is a piece of cake, but you can't put DDR3 RAM into a motherboard that doesn't accept it nor use a CPU in a socket that lacks adequate pins.

I think it is telling that the consoles of this generation have really quite weak GPUs for their launch date yet very powerful Central Processors, Triple core for Xbox 360, 1 +6 (+1) cores for the PS3 (1 main core, 6 daughter cores for gaming, 1 daughter core for the OS, 1 spare daughter core disabled for high yields). Kinda indicates the importance of powerful central parallel-isation of processing this generation.

The best value at the moment seems to be with Athlon II X2 processors.

But I worry if they have the same growth potential as going for an LGA-775 socket.

Bottom line, get a system which has a CPU that can handle all the games you want to play today and next year. But make sure it is of a socket type that you can easily upgrade the CPU in 3-4 years to get a good 5-6 years of useful life out of the system.

Remember, in 5 years time, 8-core processors may be the norm for gaming, I know, sounds crazy for calling something like that, but 5 years is 3 cycles of Moore's Law, three times the price and size of hardware will roughly half.

 

[MurderousToaster]

You'll want them to all be more or less balanced. You don't want an awesome powerhouse of a video card and then a single-core 2.3Ghz CPU or something. Then bottlenecking would occur, and games wouldn't run as nice as you'd like.

RAM is slightly less important (Basically anything 2Gb and above and you're fine for the time being), but still fairly important in the grand scheme of things.