Radeon HD 3850 a bottleneck?

[Canuck21]

Would a Radeon HD 3850 be a bottleneck in a system with an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 as the processor? I'm not a big gamer, will only play The Sims 2 and Civilization 4 and some other simulations and strategy games. I will be playing and working in Vista Ultimate 64-bit.

 

[retrorocketz]

for the games you play, no. not even at high res.

 

[Seb1]

No, it won't be a bottleneck.
Usually with a modern and decent video card the CPU it's the bottleneck.

 

[anime4u]

I got pretty bad slowdown in SimCity4 with a GeCube 3850 (512MB). I certainly consider it a bottleneck. My system is in my signature.

 

[Canuck21]

No, it won't be a bottleneck.
Usually with a modern and decent video card the CPU it's the bottleneck.

That was then. From what I've read, today's CPUs are more powerful than the GPUs.

 

[HardwareGuru]

Yep, during the days where Single Core AMD Athlon 64 was faster than Intel P4 cpus, the CPU was a bottleneck for 7800GTX/7900GTX cards. Especially, when you ran them in SLI.

That was then. From what I've read, today's CPUs are more powerful than the GPUs.

 

[NKDietrich]

I got pretty bad slowdown in SimCity4 with a GeCube 3850 (512MB). I certainly consider it a bottleneck. My system is in my signature.

That sounds more like a bug to me. My old Opteron + 7800 GTX which is slower than a 3850 can run SimCity 4 no problem.

Would a Radeon HD 3850 be a bottleneck in a system with an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 as the processor? I'm not a big gamer, will only play The Sims 2 and Civilization 4 and some other simulations and strategy games. I will be playing and working in Vista Ultimate 64-bit.

Not for that sort of game, no.