Intel HD 4600 vs NVidia GeForce 8800 GT

[Haravikk]

Okay, so I'm going to have to replace my current main computer as it's just getting less and less reliable and has been on life support for a while.

Now, I'm thinking I'm going to go small form factor, and I'm thinking of getting an i7-4790T as it's a 45W part (so easily cooled in a small case, maybe even an Akasa Euler passively cooled case). But it only has Intel's HD 4600 graphics; I'd love to have Iris Pro but annoyingly there's still no socketed part for that unless I've missed it somehow.

Anyway, the machine I'm replacing however is fairly old, and the graphics card is only a NVidia GeForce 8800 GT with 512mb GDDR3, so I'm interested to know if anyone has any ideas of what the difference in performance might actually be like? I'll be putting in 16gb of the faster RAM I can get (1866mhz CL9 I think, as over clocking would defeat the point of buying a 45W processor), so while it won't be nearly as fast as GDDR, there's plenty of capacity (hopefully not much need for swapping). At that point, how do you think they'd stack up against each other?

I've looked around for numbers to compare, but there's such a big time gap between them that it's hard to say for sure whether the numbers really tell the whole story. For example, I expect HD 4600 has more modern shader support, as any full screen effect such as depth of field brings the GeForce 8800 GT to its knees because I'm not sure it has any kind of hardware support for it. The 8800GT leads on texture units, but I'm not sure how important they are these days and so-on.

I'd appreciate any thoughts; please don't suggest graphics cards to add, as I'm definitely not going to have room for one, and this isn't going to be a gaming machine anyway. I'm just hoping to get any idea of whether I should expect a big step back on the GPU performance, or it might even be close or better due to modern features.

 

[Newbbuilder11]

Okay, so I'm going to have to replace my current main computer as it's just getting less and less reliable and has been on life support for a while.

Now, I'm thinking I'm going to go small form factor, and I'm thinking of getting an i7-4790T as it's a 45W part (so easily cooled in a small case, maybe even an Akasa Euler passively cooled case). But it only has Intel's HD 4600 graphics; I'd love to have Iris Pro but annoyingly there's still no socketed part for that unless I've missed it somehow.

Anyway, the machine I'm replacing however is fairly old, and the graphics card is only a NVidia GeForce 8800 GT with 512mb GDDR3, so I'm interested to know if anyone has any ideas of what the difference in performance might actually be like? I'll be putting in 16gb of the faster RAM I can get (1866mhz CL9 I think, as over clocking would defeat the point of buying a 45W processor), so while it won't be nearly as fast as GDDR, there's plenty of capacity (hopefully not much need for swapping). At that point, how do you think they'd stack up against each other?

I've looked around for numbers to compare, but there's such a big time gap between them that it's hard to say for sure whether the numbers really tell the whole story. For example, I expect HD 4600 has more modern shader support, as any full screen effect such as depth of field brings the GeForce 8800 GT to its knees because I'm not sure it has any kind of hardware support for it. The 8800GT leads on texture units, but I'm not sure how important they are these days and so-on.

I'd appreciate any thoughts; please don't suggest graphics cards to add, as I'm definitely not going to have room for one, and this isn't going to be a gaming machine anyway. I'm just hoping to get any idea of whether I should expect a big step back on the GPU performance, or it might even be close or better due to modern features.

So you are going for a Devil's canyon Chip? That is a Z97 processor so you will need a Z97 board. Wait what do you need this machine for?

 

[runswindows95]

If all you're going to do is watch movies with this system, you won't notice a difference overall.

 

[Saberus]

I'm not a fan of using Intel graphics for gaming. Intel's HD series can do OK for gaming, but I think the design focus was on video playback/home theater and not gaming.

 

[Newbbuilder11]

If you are going for just a streaming PC then a I7 4790T is WAAAY overkill. I stream just fine with my I3 4130. as for ram 4GB would suit just fine, and then all you would need is a budget h81 board or B85(B85 if you plan to game on it)

 

[Haravikk]

It's for a replacement for my current work machine, which is a dual quad-core xeon (no hyper threading), so an i7 these days is pretty close (in many areas better) on performance so on the CPU side I should be able to just keep doing what I do (a lot of parallel programming and occasional video transcoding, but nothing so long running I need a xeon or ECC anymore).

My concern for the GPU is just that I currently play point and click adventure games plus strategy games like Civilization V on my work machine; the GeForce 8800 GT is fine for these, I'm just wondering if the HD 4600 can also handle the same kind of things. I'm not looking to push forward to anything really demanding as I'll be replacing my 360 with a new gaming PC for that kind of stuff, but aiming to mostly use a game-pad with that, so it'd be nice if the HD 4600 can still handle the stuff that really requires keyboard/mouse.

Plus like I say, the 8800 GT is pretty old now, so I'm just interested to see how far integrated graphics have caught up. It's still a shame Intel hasn't released a socketed Iris Pro though, or I'd grab that in an instant instead.

 

[runswindows95]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7032/amds-richland-vs-intels-haswell-gpu-on-the-desktop-radeon-hd-8670d-hd-4600/4

Looks like the HD4600 will have issue running Civilization 4 smoothly. If anything, would consider even get a newer GPU to save on power requirements since the 8800GT requires a PCie power plug. It wouldn't make sense to get such a low wattage CPU then add in a power hungry card. Even a R7 250 would be an improvement, and doesn't require a power plug.

 

[Haravikk]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7032/amds-richland-vs-intels-haswell-gpu-on-the-desktop-radeon-hd-8670d-hd-4600/4
Looks like the HD4600 will have issue running Civilization 4 smoothly.

Hmm, looks like those figures are for compute performance decompressing textures, which having plenty of RAM would hopefully avoid the need for. Although in the same article the HD 4600 does seem to do pretty decently; managing Bioshock Infinite at nearly 30 fps (albeit on medium settings) is pretty good considering. Definitely not serious gaming good, but might mean it'll be okay.

If anything, would consider even get a newer GPU to save on power requirements since the 8800GT requires a PCie power plug. It wouldn't make sense to get such a low wattage CPU then add in a power hungry card. Even a R7 250 would be an improvement, and doesn't require a power plug.

I would, but like I say I'm probably going small form factor, which is partly why I picked 45W; the Akasa Euler cases are particularly enticing, but that means Thin Mini-ITX with no PCIe card slots (except Mini PCIe). I'll keep graphics card investment for a gaming PC, I just wanted to get some info on how well the HD 4600 can handle light gaming, but more specifically compared to my GeForce 8800 GT since that's what I have now to compare against.