Introduction

In our video card benchmarks we run a $1,000 980X at 4.2GHz and while we understand that it's not a CPU most people use, there's a logical reason behind it. When we benchmark cards we want to make sure that we don't hit a CPU limitation and limit the maximum performance of a possible setup.

So, to make sure that doesn't happen, we overclock our CPU as much as possible. Today, though, we're going to mix it up a bit. Instead of testing different video cards, we'll be looking at our 980X at a number of different speeds.

We've recently tested the HD 6850 in Crossfire and loved the performance it offers. What we love more, though, is the price. If you're paying out $400 for a video card setup the chances are you're not putting over double that on the CPU, which is something we completely understand.

So what we've done today is grabbed our 980X, disabled a couple of cores and started testing performance at a number of different speeds. Sure, more CPU is better; but how much better? - What kind of CPU should you be buying for a setup like the HD 6850 in Crossfire?

These are questions we're going to answer today. Let's have a closer look at our testbed and what exactly we've done before we get into the actual performance and see the CPU scaling effect on our video cards today.