Will my CPU bottleneck a potential high end card?

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Falling Anvil

[H]ard|Gawd
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Nov 3, 2007
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Ok, so I'm in the market for a new video card at this time, looking at either an HD 4870, GTX 280, or maybe a 260(not very likely with the rumored extra shader card coming out soon, maybe). Problem is, I don't know if my CPU, an E6550 @ stock, is going to bottleneck these cards. Before anyone says to overclock it, it's a Dell with it's guts moved to another case so I can't overclock unfortunately, and getting to a motherboard that can probably wouldn't be worth it to me in terms of cost and effort. I've got two gigs of ram currently and looking to go up to four so I don't think ram will be an issue, and a Corsair 550VX that'll probably be able to power anything under a 4870x2 so that should be ok. Only the CPU is holding me back.

Ya think I can get by with it.? :p

(Before you ask, yes I do feel kinda silly asking if a 6-series C2D will bottleneck anything. ;) )
 
It depends on what resolution you are going to be playing at. The high the resolution, the less cpu bound the graphics processing will be.
 
I actually don't play at very high resolutions...but if I get something high end I'll definitely look to crank the resolution up to as high as possible! :)
 
Worse, currently a 17, though I'm feeling the need to upgrade that too. :p

I'm being silly enough atm to use this for bragging rights really. ;)
 
Clock the CPU.
For free you can get enough performance to push the newer cards pretty hard.
 
Falling Anvil said:
Worse, currently a 17, though I'm feeling the need to upgrade that too. :p

I'm being silly enough atm to use this for bragging rights really. ;)
Click to expand...

if your epenis is not big enough then get a bigger monitor. ;)

at that resolution you will likely be cpu bound but it will be fast enough as not to make a difference. in fact a 9600GT would be plenty.
 
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