K6-2 and K6-3 Upgrade Guide

Video Card Upgrade - Content Creation Performance

Although the choices as to which CPU to go with or how much memory to upgrade to are relatively easy to determine, choosing the video card for your system is a much more difficult task. For example, is the speed of the GeForce2 GTS wasted on an older system? Is a Voodoo3 2000 fast enough? These questions are not easy ones, so in order to investigate which video card belongs with which system, we benchmarked both our base system with a K6-2 300 MHz processor as well as our base system with the K6-3 450 MHz processor with a wide variety of video cards in order to see where, if at all, performance is limited by the CPU speed.

Once again, we are going to lump together two categories. In order to see if there was any increase in 2D application speed with a video card upgrade, we took the video card that is able to produce 2D images at the most speed, the GeForce2 GTS, and placed it in our two test systems (the base system with a K6-2 300 MHz and a K6-3 450 MHz). Let's examine the results.

As you can see, the 2D performance between the fastest card and the slowest card is 0%. In other words, the video card is not a bottleneck at all when in 2D. The story, however, is quite different when it comes to 3D gaming.