Hi All, I have been searching all over the net looking for any recommendation for ratios between the power of CPU, RAM and GPU Are there any best practices or guidelines? I am planning on the bellow configuration of my PC: - ASUS XONAR PHOEBUS / SOL - DVD + /-RW Samsung int. 22x - Corsair Professional Series Gold AX1200 High Performance Full Modular - Thermaltake VN10001W2N Level 10GT - 2 X PowerColor R9 290X 4GB OC (BF4 Edition) - INTEL CPU 6 Core i7-4930K (3.40GHz) - ASUS MAXIMUS VI EXTREME - Corsair DDR3 2133MHz 16GB 2x240 Dimm - XEON 26XX BXSTS200C TERM SOLUN - 2 X 1TB Western Digital Black I am planning to have 16 GB RAM, but the question is: Is it going to be utilized? is there any single game on the market which consumes more than 8 GB? I know that it is not always the more the better. It is all about whether the software is going to dump data in this 16GB memory Please note that i dont have budget limitation and i have no issues to get 32GB RAM, but do have a principle which says do NOT wast money when it is not needed My second questions is: How many GPUs my CPU can handle? The Mobo can theoretically take up to 4 GPUs Although there is not a single game which consumes currently such power, but just for the future, in case next year or year after there will be a game which will require 12GB GPU, never know... will my CPU be a bottleneck for 4 GPUs? So basically i am trying to understand whether there is a formula, which can give you a ballpark about any ratios between CPU, RAM, GPUs and possibly Mobo? In some places i read that if you have a 6GB GPU you need to have 12 GB RAM, but this does not make any sense to me, because i am not sure if this 12 GB RAM going to be utilized by any game at this given moment Is it the more GPUs you have the more RAM you need? even if a specific game needs lets say 2GB RAM, then if we have 4 GPUs then we need also to multiply the RAM by 4? The same applies for the CPU ratios to GPU
Answering your questions in order: No, will not be fully utilized. No, not single game takes more than 8 GB. Partially yes. More memory you have, more data OS can use as cache. However if you start computer and start game, OS has no time to do any caching in background so that does no help at all. So I think you will not need 32 GB, it's just waste of money. There is no upper limit for that. Your CPU can handle unlimited amount of GPU's. However too many GPU's will surely cause problems and at some point CPU will come bottleneck. 4 GPU's or what? Unless you are using at least three monitors, you should have no use for 4 GPU's. Generally GPU development has been ultra slow during last few years, CPU development even slower. Your CPU will last for at least 5 years, probably 7-8. There is no formula because saying just GPU can mean anything between low end and high end. That 6GB GPU 12 GB RAM does not make any sense for me either. There is no formula between GPU RAM and motherboard RAM. Also there is no formula for "x GPU's need y CPU's". Basically there are no guidelines because CPU can have 1-16 cores and video card can have 1-2 GPU's ranging from low end to ultra high end.
First of i would like to thank you so much for your time and useful info, I know that different games utilize more CPU while others utilize more GPU But i was just wondering if there is any flow chart which explains the relation between those three units, CPU, GPU and RAM I read from some pages that whatEVER the GPU is going to do, the CPU has to process it first and send\recieve to\from GPU, does not this make CPU easily a bottleneck for 4 GPUs? I also read on other pages that Nvidia for example recommends one CPU Core for each GPU In my case i have 6 core CPU, so in THEORY, IF what i read is actually true, my CPU should be able to handle 6 GPUs without being a bottle neck I totally agree with you that all depends on the class\level of GPU\CPU But if we are talking about top CPU like 4930k and top GPU like 290x, is not there a best practice which says: 1) have top CPU\GPU you need to have for each GPU one core (not one CPU as it can be multi-core) 2) for each 1000MHz GPU you need 1GHz CPU 3) etc... so that we can compare apples to apples, and speak more concrete, because just generalizing and saying one core for each GPU, it could a crappy core with a monster GPU or vise verse I also read on other pages that this concept has been being arguable since ages ago, but i dont understand why someone cant make a simple test and take one CPU and keep adding up GPU and RAM until they find the threasold when the CPU becomes a bottleneck, and then we draw some conclusions about the correlation between the power of CPU to GPU and RAM in between
No, there is not. It depends on CPU type, GPU type and software, so it's virtually impossible to make. Partially that may be true but modern processors has enough power to feed many GPU's. That is just general example, so that people do not try to combine cheap dual core processor with 4 GPU's and then wonder what's wrong. This is exactly same thing that video card manufacturers say about power supplies. "This card requires at least xxxW PSU". Hoe do they know what other parts are on computer? They don't so they say something like "for high end card buy high end PSU". 1. There's no actual reason why you should have one CPU per one GPU. As stated previously, it's useless to combine cheal dual core processor with 4 GPU's. So that's just to say that combine multi GPU setup with something more powerful than cheapest processor. 2. As we go to software side, that kind of assumptions goes to waste. One software may give results like that but then another software... There's no point in that. For gaming, 4 GB RAM is enough for every game except for some of latest games and 4GB is enough if we leave OS out of account. And because 8 GB RAM is enough for ANY game with ANY video card, there is absolutely no reason to test when RAM amount becomes bottleneck. If one can afford 600 euros for video card, one can also afford buy 8 GB RAM so no bottleneck there. Also it takes huge amount of time to test bottlenecks like that even when keeping CPU or GPU same and using one software. So basically: - 20 different games - 20 different GPU's (CPU stays same) - 20 different CPU's (GPU stays same) - Take overclocking into accout - Take graphical settings into account And more. That takes enormous amount of work and results are mostly useless and results will get obsolate very quickly. So nobody bothers to do it.
Thank you so much! I think now it is very clear to me Thats why no body has done this type of concrete testing, as it is just waste of a lot of time and money which anyway will become meaning less in few months I really appreciate your feedback, time and effort one last questions, if possible, looks like 99.99% i will get the 290x GPU, but the only think which is making me a BIT hesitant is the everybody is talking about it getting over heated VERY fast and VERY easily What would be the best solution for this?
AMD R290x reference cooler sucks. Manufacturers are already using some better coolers and after some time there should be even better. That will eliminate all problems. 290x itself is not any hotter chip than NVIDIA's brdt offerings and clock speed issues are today present in many products that adjust clocks by monitoring thermals or power consumption. So best solution is to use better cooling. Replacing cooling system may damage card however. If you have no problems with those Powercolor cards, there is no problem then.
