I hope this helps other folks when they may have an old rig and are thinking of getting a sparkly new GDR5, PCIe 2+, GPU - so you know results ... was this a bottleneck experience ??
My sUPER BUDGET desk-top, a dual core AMD 5200 (2.6) with 4 gig of ram (667) combined with an ASUS GTX 650Ti boost (latest drivers installed) freshly installed windows ultimate 64, 500GB HD, flew along when I tried DX11 Just cause 2 - maxed out all candy on at HD TV res. It looked and felt amazing and i thought na, na, na, na na Tom .. and your hardware!! .... But ....
This particular game (demo D/l from steam) was a red herring. I tried 2 games Black ops 2.. (please im not a massive fan dont slate me)
To sort the bottleneck i had high settings some on ultra .. V sync on and off.. tinkering with low - to high corpses, depth of field AA and FXAA and varying shadows. I got an inconsistent 12 - 44 FPS (depending on what part of the game, the save the president mission with grenn LED gun that shoots through walls :/ was the lowest frame rate and it didnt make a massive difference what tweaks i made in many places. this was on single player game.
then CRYSIS (2007) that ran at 22 to 60 FPS. The lower frame rate came along when things started happening (blowing up stuff and killing people you know) not when I wasn't just enjoying the island... and it is a lovely island too, I found myself swimming for a while...(I hadn't played the first game of Crysis before) big difference as to whether i had it in windowed or in full screen also - is that like a Vsync default?
So .. I am sorry for doubting you clever people at TOMS HARWARE i was soo very wrong
and its gone back to AMAZON and im thinking of getting a new pc today (well new to me). A healthier combination; GIGABYTE 78LMT (no SATA3 but usb3), fx6100 (3.3), GTX 460, DDR3 4GB..