Well pretty much every enthusiast site I read its the common opinion that CPU power is far ahead of GPU. Now taking theoretical stuff out of thin air doesn't realy apply again towards gaming or applications most of us are using. I think your talking apples and oranges here since CPU's are far faster then GPU's in just the MHZ alone. If what you assumed to be true we would be using GPU technology to run all the mathmatical functions current CPU tech does. Your talking one item ment to do one function the GPU which is to render graphics vs the cpu that does pretty much every math function on the entire system. I'll give you your flops argument for raw throwput but thats not the only way pc's are rated by any means.
And yet super computers are moving to using GPUs instead of CPUs to computer math equations and such because they are much more powerful. And programs are now being written to use the GPU to encode videos. Things are moving more and more to using the power of the GPU to do things instead of the CPU because of its massively parallel architecture. The GPU may run in less MHz, but the GPU has tons and tons of "processing cores". http://gpgpu.org/2010/10/28/nvidia-tesla-gpus-power-worlds-fastest-supercomputer#more-2931 GPUs can be programed to do other things besides produce an image. One of the most used things is a program called "Folding @ home". This article is from back in 2006, so remember that and think about how much more powerful and optimized for this type of computing GPUs have become in the past 4 years http://techreport.com/articles.x/11022/1 Yep I bought one as well with the price drop. Performance is just crazy :O Good choice on the CPU cooler as well. I have lost touch with whats the great coolers out there now since I ran a non-overclockable system with very limited heatsink choices for so long. Ill add that cooler to my link list in the other post
It's huge, and overhangs your memory slots a lot, so if your RAM has huge hs's you may be in trouble.
That probably wouldnt work then since the RAM has pretty tall heatspreads on them. A lot of high performance RAM does nows days Ill try and pick out a smaller but still good enough CPU cooler EDIT: I know the Sunbeam "Core Contact" is not the top end cooler compared to some of the newer heatsinks out there, but it is still pretty nice and will allow for a pretty decent overclock. Also it will work with the tall heatsink RAM, and is towards the cheap side of performance air coolers. Thats why I picked that one.
not sure if you built your rig yet but here is what I built about 3 weeks ago. My PC died so I had to buy parts before I could get Black Friday deals. Motherboard: ASUS P6X58D-E LGA 1366 Intel X58 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Processor: Intel Core i7-950 Bloomfield 3.06GHz LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Processor CPU cooler: COOLER MASTER Hyper 212 Plus Memory: 6GB (3 x 2GB) CORSAIR XMS3 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Triple Channel Kit Desktop Memory Hard Drives: 1tb Samsung 7200 RPM, 250gb from my old PC Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 470 (Fermi) SuperClocked 1280MB PSU: CORSAIR CMPSU-750TX 750W Monitor: Hanns-G 25" 1080p Sound Card: Onboard chip Speakers/Headphones: Logitech mini speakers, Logitech clearchat comfort headset Keyboard: Generic Mouse: Logitech MX518 Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate x64 Computer Case: CoolerMaster HAF 922 I also re-used my old optical drives I got this for around $1050 but with deals coming up on Cyber Monday it would easily be down to $900-950. I already saw the heatsink, video card, processor, and hard drive on sale for black friday.
I made sure I didn't grab a super high end ram kit. Not paying enormous prices for Corsair or anything though. Problem for me was my CPU cooler barely cleared my VREG heatsink on my motherboard, was not worried about RAM clearance though. Either way, one has to be aware of both of these things.