CPUs as performance bottlenecks

[NJ5]

Khuutra said:

NJ5 said:

If you care a lot about power consumption, are you sure you need such a high-powered card as the HD 6950 or 560 Ti? What resolution are you going to game at?

1080p, I figure. It's not power consumption so much as heat and noise.

Other than power consumption, the only thing affecting heat and noise should be the particular cooling solution used on the card you choose (that varies among brands so I guess you're checking particular models of a 560 Ti for example).

For 1080p a HD 6850/6870 or equivalent on the Nvidia side might be enough, that cuts power consumption to 150 W from 200 W compared to the cards under discussion here, without losing much performance. The AnandTech link previously posted in the thread has some benchmarks of those cards as well.