When it comes to choosing a graphics card for a budget gaming rig built on the LGA 775 platform, there is no avoiding of everyone’s favorite concept of bottlenecking. It’s common knowledge that the latest high end graphics card would be largely wasted on an old processor, since the processor would be the limiting factor in performance. So in such a case, you can chose an older, cheaper graphics card, and get the same level of performance. But this concept can go wildly out of control, and give birth to a crazy notion that the older, weaker graphics card would actually perform faster because of processor bottlenecking and driver overhead.

Now in some cases this is true – for example when dealing with old 1990’s processors and attempting to combine them with much newer graphics cards that use much more complex drivers than the simple 1990’s cards. But we are not dealing with a 300MHz AMD K6-2 here. We are dealing with a 3.0+ GHz Core2Quad, and the argument that an old midrange DX12 GPU like the gtx750ti would be faster than a newer high end DX12 GPU like the gtx1070 can not go unchallenged. So we first need to put that crazy theory to rest. And then, we can look at several graphics cards, ranging from weakest to strongest, and see how much GPU performance you actually get.

In this video, we take a look at the relative performance of three graphics cards on LGA 775 – the Geforce gtx750ti, the Radeon R9 270x, and the Geforce gtx1070, to find out how much GPU do you actually need on the old platform.

Watch here: