Often a computer is designed to meet a set budget and therefore the range of hardware that can be purchased is in some way limited. For those building to a limited budget, it is important to create a well balanced computer. This will allow the user to obtain the very best performance possible, as all the hardware components will be able to operate at their maximum capability. Nevertheless, it is often very difficult to select the right hardware components that will complement each other.

Quite often I find the gamers choice in certain hardware components could be considered as 'overkill'. A simple example, pairing a GeForce 9800 GTX series graphics card with an early model Athlon64 processor would surely be a candidate for overkill on the graphics cards behalf. That said, the GeForce 9800 GTX is an impressive graphics card and is currently one of the fastest solutions available. As impressive as the GeForce 9800 GTX is, the 9800 GX2 is even better, featuring two high-speed G92 GPU’s.

Featuring two GPU’s clocked at 600MHz each makes the GeForce 9800 GX2 the single fastest graphics card on the planet. This being the case we wonder what kind of CPU could deliver a balance between processing and rendering power. Currently both AMD and Intel do offer a range of impressive multi-core processors, so there is an extensive range of options to choose from. Instead of buying up the entire range of AMD and Intel processors we have handpicked just three processors.

The Core 2 Duo E8400 was used to measure the performance of the new Intel 45nm dual-core processors. This processor was tested at speeds between 2.0GHz and 4.2GHz, which will give us a clear picture of what frequency is required out of the Core 2 Duo processors to power a GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics card. Picking an Intel quad-core processor was a little trickier, the Q6600 looked to be an obvious pick, but we wanted a 45nm quad-core processor.

The clock multiplier of the Core 2 Quad Q9300, Q9450 and even the Q9550 processors was lower than we required for this test. Ideally matching the 9x clock multiplier of the E8400 processor was what we wanted to do and in order to do this the Core 2 Extreme QX9650 was required. The QX9650 was tested at frequencies ranging from 2.0GHz through to 3.6GHz, which again will give us a good idea of how the 45nm quad-core processors handle the GeForce 9800 GX2.

Finally AMD’s latest Phenom, the 9850 built around the new B3 stepping, has been included, though this particular processor will not be overclocked as we are still having a few stability issues. This means the Phenom X4 9850 will be tested at frequencies ranging between 2.0GHz and 2.5GHz using the GeForce 9800 GX2.

When recently testing the Phenom X4 9850 against the Core 2 Quad Q6600 in a head to head battle, the Phenom did surprisingly well when it came to gaming performance. However in that article we used the GeForce 9800 GTX, where as today we are using the GeForce 9800 GX2. Interestingly the Phenom X4 9850 appears to have fared much better with the GeForce 9800 GTX when compared to the faster GeForce 9800 GX2.