Shall my AMD Athlon 3500+ Bottlenect a 1950 Pro Video Card?

I have a CPU (AMD Athlon3500+). And wonder if my CPU should bottleneck the new Video card 1950 Pro that I want to buy. I want to my computer to play the demanding games (such as Oblivion, Company of Heroes etc). I need some advice on this Please!

On the two games you mentioned yes. On other games like FEAR no. It's not a cut and dry percentage, it's more app dependent. In RTS games you can be really cpu bound when there alot of characters on screen. Source games tend to get cpu bound also because of the A.I. and physics. My advice is just to overclock. Push it to 2.5ghz or higher and you should be fine. Although my opty at 2.8ghz still bottlenecks some games.

A X1950Pro will work great with your 3500+.
Even if your 3500+ is not top of the line anymore, it's still a very fast processor.

No bottleneck would occur, Tom's did an article a few days ago with a 3400+ and there was no real bottlenecks present.

That's pretty much impossible in todays day and age. A CPU will automatically turn itself off if it gets too hot.

Pretty easy to overclock, though i'm not to sure abuot overclocking 754 semprons. They should reach around 2.4-2.5ghz on the stock cooler. I'd look at an overclocking guide which would give you a great starting place.

No bottleneck would occur, Tom's did an article a few days ago with a 3400+ and there was no real bottlenecks present.

You sir, have no idea about game bottlenecks. True, there are alot of games where his cpu is just fine, but there is also alot where it will underperform. I'll give one example that I've tested. My opty 144(with an overclocked 1800xt) at 1.8ghz in oblivion scored 10fps in a cpu heavy city section of a city. So I saved the game at that point, restarted the system and overclocked the cpu to 2.8ghz and scored 15fps in that very same section. That screams cpu bottleneck. I need more cpu power than a single core athlon can provide to get playable framerates. That's why I'm going conroe atm. To be fast enough for single threaded games and ready for multi-threaded games when they start hitting this year.

Very good OC for 3000, I never hit 2.6 on my old 3500+ clawhammer. Although it was 110nm, might have been a ram issue. :?

See that's what I don't like. When they do a cpu comparison and don't include minimum/maximum rates along with the avg. rates. Avg rates are not noticeable because they are almost always over 30fps. Fluctuations that high don't affect gameplay. The ones that affect gameplay are the minimum rates(or slowdowns). In oblivion my minimum rates went up 50%(10 to 15fps) from a 55% cpu overclock. That is near perfect scaling, and is most definitely cpu bound gameplay. When my core 2 duo arrives tuesday I'm going to test how much higher it goes then. I'm hoping the cpu bottleneck is removed completely.

So 30fps or over, is not noticeable

Well to be fair frames rates over 30fps are noticeable do to the lack of motion blur that occurs. I believe the 30fps number is based of a number of experiments performed during Bell labs glory days, in which observations where made on acquired data.

Only if you plan on leaving the heatsink/fan off of it.
The things you hear.....

I had that cpu with a 9800 pro. If its a C0 clawhammer core then good luck OCing, coz you're gonna need it. Thats the one I had and I got to about 2.2Ghz stable (enough for me anyway, probably not rock solid). Drop the memory divider and you might get further, but I didnt really try since my KV8-MAX3 mobo was impossible to play around with. Any HT multi change and I got a failed POST. What board you got?

First part to Ryokinshin
/The cpu isn't really bottlenecking the gpu. This is a misunderstanding that is throughout all the forums. It's bottlenecking the game. Some games want a fast cpu some don't. The games you mentioned are both cpu dependent so it could be the cpu or you might have mem issues I can't tell you. A faster cpu will help though./

I want give a stupid analogy real quick.

Look at it like this. Your fps is like a three-legged race. The cpu and gpu are tied together trying to go fast as they can. One can't go faster than the other. Say the cpu is doing 25fps and the gpu is doing 40fps, the game is only going to go 25fps because the cpu is holding the team back as they are tied together.

You can say the dirt they are racing on is the game engine. Sometimes the dirt on the gpu side gets rougher to run on(lots of gfx effects on screen) and the gpu slows to about 25fps. Now the dirt on the cpu side gets smoother(no heavy physics/AI/whatever going on) and the cpu is running at 40fps. In this example you are still locked at 25fps but this time it's the gpu to blame.

There are many times during a game that it gets rough on either the cpu or gpu. The thing is that most devs try not to make games that are cpu heavy because the majority of users are running pent 4's which are not fast for games. Instead they focus on gfx because you can scale that easily by lowering the res(effectively smoothing the dirt in my example) or lowering gfx quality. Not many games have settings to lower the load on a cpu and the ones that do it makes only like a 10% difference.

I don't even know what I'm getting at anymore. Hope I didn't confuse anybody :? . I'm just bored waiting on my conroe to arrive so I can get back into some games. Right now I'm on an athlon xp 3000 with a via s3g gfx chip in it. My main point is that some games will benefit from a faster cpu and some will not. I've had games that showed 0% increase in frames from a 55% cpu overclock. It's because my videocard is the slow one in the race at that time.

Edit* Wanted to add I agree with kmjohnso. An athlon 64 3000 and a 7600gt are a almost perfectly matched up. I'd say you get gpu bound 95% of the time so the cpu speed wouldn't make much of a dif.

It would be interesting to see as well what changing your 1800XT to a 1900XT would do. Might be that the video card is holding your frame rates back as much, or even more than the cpu.

Where have you been hindin?

I am not familiar with thoses motherboard's or psu's, I do know that the 7600gt get it's power from the pcix16 slot. So it could be the psu's. Did this problem start after you installed the 7600 or before? If so what card did you have in it?

P.S. the more info the better

Could very well be the PSU's, although I am unsure. Do you know the spec's for the unit's?

i actually need to get psus anyways, so ill come bak tmr