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We've included this sectoin to drive home a point we like to make as often as possible - an unbalanced system is akin to throwing money out the window. We benchmarked the Radeon 9700 Pro, and an older GeForce 2 GTS, on four different systems, varying from an old Pentium 3 1.0GHz, up to our 2.80 GHz Pentium 4. As you can see, the Radeon 9700 Pro clearly needs a lot of CPU horsepower to produce at its maximum, while you can feed the old GeForce 2 GTS as much CPU as you like, and it won't go anywhere. There is absolutely no point in pairing the Radeon 9700 Pro with a CPU slower than a Pentium 4 1.80 GHz (or AthlonXP 1600+).

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Unreal Tournament gives similar results. Remember, if you're constructing a gaming system, use components of equivalent design, or one or the other will just become a bottleneck, and ruin system performance altogether.