Windows 7: Core 2 Quad - bottleneck for GTX 480?

Well I can tell you that with Crysis on enthuasiast settings, with my GTX 275 and Q9550 runs fantastic, think i get an average of 30fps which is fine to me.

Put it this way, GTA IV is just as heavy in my opinion and again i get average of 30 to 40 fps.




Oh and also, all my games run on a res of 1920x1200.

Well, I will be purchasing the card, once i have enough money together (400 to 500 squids is a tad pricey). I will run some games and probably 3D Mark Vantage as well as my other Graphics stress tests and i will then publish my results on here.

Give me a month... roughly.

Lucky

I guess in my opinion if you go with the gtx 480 , might as well get an I7 to go with it or i would think you are not getting the most out of the video card and coulda saved money with something not so spendy.

Again just my 2 cents

I would upgrade to a i7, but in order to do that, i would need to upgrade my Motherboard as well and in the end i would be spending a good £1000 or more. I would be saving for sometime.

I will risk and just buy the card for now and see how i get on.

Either way, i will have better through-put than what i have now.

Lucky

With the normal clock speeds, I would have to say that it would be a bottleck.
However, after increasing clock speeds, I would say it wouldn't be as much of a bottleneck as it was earlier.

The term bottlenecking works something like this:
In games (or any other application), there are two components that play two major roles: The CPU and the GPU. They work pretty much independently of each other. A GPU is used for pretty much all of the pixel-pushing for the resolution and all of the special graphics effects. The CPU is also used for various calculations that help make the gameplay actually go. It all depends on the application. For a lot of rendering/physics calculations, or just a lot of stuff going on in the game, (such as in Microsoft Flight Simulator), then the CPU might be a bottleneck. For stuff like crysis (w/ high settings), the GPU then would wind up being a bottleneck.

But in your case, it would most likely not be.

The term "bottleneck" gets tossed around too often, imho, and it may prevent someone from getting really neat stuff that would work out just fine.

A bottleneck is either theoretical or practical.

All systems have a theoretical bottleneck. You can think of it as, "a chain is only as strong as its weakest link". In the case of the OP, the cpu is the weakest link; however, that won't create a bottleneck, because it's only a bottleneck in theory. In practice, he will be just fine.

You can mitigate a cpu bottleneck by making the card work harder. Tragically, , all the OP would have to do is pump up the eye candy. With nvidia being able to render a ridiculous 32xAA, he won't ever experience a true practical bottleneck... of the type that would force him to buy a new cpu.

As fumz has said you will be absolutely fine with that set up and I suppose it'll only be a matter of time before you add a newer cpu/mobo.

Tri-SLI with GTX 480 would be bottlenecked, not Tri-SLI with GTS 250. That is a low end graphics card.

It's clock speed that bottlenecks the CPU with Tri-SLI, not the number of cores. No game will use more than 4 cores. With gaming, that Phenom II X6 is actually WORSE than a Core 2 Quad: AMD's Six-Core Phenom II X6 1090T & 1055T Reviewed - AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News