Are you an AMD user who was planning on upgrading to a GeForce 8800 GTX or 8800 GTS sometime in the near future? If so, then you'll want to check out this article. The chaps over at Firing Squad gathered AMD CPUs ranging from the X2 3800+ all the way up to the FX-62, and paired them with the GeForce 8800 GTX and 8800 GTS, as well as ATI's Radeon X1950 XTX.

Are you an AMD user who was planning on upgrading to a GeForce 8800 GTX or 8800 GTS sometime in the near future? If so, then you'll want to check out this article. The chaps over at Firing Squad gathered AMD CPUs ranging from the X2 3800+ all the way up to the FX-62, and paired them with the GeForce 8800 GTX and 8800 GTS, as well as ATI's Radeon X1950 XTX.

The bottom line for those of you with slower AMD X2 CPUs is you're going to want to overclock your processor a little in order to get the best performance out of GeForce 8800. The exact amount you should shoot for is going to depend on which graphics card you plan on getting. If you were thinking about upgrading to a GeForce 8800 GTS, you won't need to hit speeds quite as high; 2.4GHz or more is a good starting point you should shoot for when overclocking. But if you were planning on picking up a GeForce 8800 GTX, our 2.6GHz 5000+ was CPU bound in some cases, so you'll probably want to shoot for even higher speeds.

Of course, another aspect we noticed is that the amount you're CPU-bound varies depending on the game. In games based on older game engines like Valve's Source (HL2 and Dark Messiah) and Doom 3 (Quake 4), we found ourselves often CPU-bound with the GeForce 8800 GTX and GTS. Flight sims also draw heavily on CPU performance and therefore it was no surprise to see us being held back in Lock On: Modern Air Combat.

In fact if you've got an X2 3800+ running at stock speeds, there's no point in upgrading to a GeForce 8800 GTX, as there were often cases where the 3800+/8800 GTX combination were outrun by the 8800 GTS and a faster CPU like the 4200+ or 4600+.