Hi guys, I've been reading a lot on CPUs lately... trying to learn and understand new things and i have a couple of questions regarding ATI Radeon 2900xt Crossfire. Can a Core 2 Duo e6550 run these two cards at their potential or will they be bottlenecked by the CPU? Also... how does its little brother the Core Duo T2700 fare in this situation? Half the FSB speed and cache means it can't run these two at their potential? or is it all just about raw clock speed and power? Thanks guys :) Hi :)

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um...? Hi :)

2900XT? Not the best card. Unless it's under $80, you'd be better off aiming for at least an HD3870. The 4850 is also quite inexpensive and much faster than the 3870. The 2900XT was hot and slow--a Prescott of the videocard world. It was also the only Radeon HD card that did not feature hardware video decoding (even the lowly HD 2400 featured UVD). Core Duo? That won't even fit an LGA775 socket. The Core Duo is a 32-bit, mobile-only CPU. It is in no way the e6550's little brother. That title belongs to the Pentium Dual Core. An e6550 won't bottleneck two HD 3870-level cards, but it may hold a pair of HD 4850s back. The Quad-Pumped Super P3: Pentium M Dothan @ 2.82GHz (166x17) 3GB PC6400 @ 667MHz 9600GT Blu-Ray Modified PowerMac G4 Quicksilver case Homebuilt 1080p projector Vista SP1

I chose 2900xt cards for my scenario based on PCI-Express v1.X cards... even though v2 cards are backwards compatible. I guess it was just random curiosity :) Core Duos can be used with those specialty boards so they can be used on the desktop... and there is a crossfire core duo board available too :) I spoke of the t2700 being the e6550's little brother due to the same clock speed but having half the bus and cache... and being a core duo not a core 2 duo. Not exactly it's little brother so to speak... but you get what i mean. Oh and some of those early Pentium Dual Cores are Yonah based =P So neither CPUs would hold back those old hot 2900xt cards in crossfire? Hi :)

Oh, you're talking about one of those Socket M boards? I just thought you were working with an LGA775 board since you mentioned the e6550. "Oh and some of those early Pentium Dual Cores are Yonah based =P" All of the desktop P-Dual Cores are Core 2-based. You're right, though; some mobile P-DCs are Yonah-based. "So neither CPUs would hold back those old hot 2900xt cards in crossfire?" The e6550 is a great deal faster than the T2700, being Core 2-based and all. However, based on the fact that the older Core Duo is about as efficient as the Athlon X2 per clock, I'm gonna say that the T2700 won't hold back a pair of 2900XTs. And if it did, it wouldn't be a very big bottleneck. Still, 2900XTs? Kinda defeats the purpose of having an energy efficient, cool-running mobile-on-desktop rig, if you ask me. The Quad-Pumped Super P3: Pentium M Dothan @ 2.82GHz (166x17) 3GB PC6400 @ 667MHz 9600GT Blu-Ray Modified PowerMac G4 Quicksilver case Homebuilt 1080p projector Vista SP1

Hahaha definitely defeats the purpose... unless someone is just a die hard P6 lover... even though Core 2 is an ascendant of P6 since core arch is based on P6. Thanks for the info jack! =) Hi :)