celeron e1200 + geforce 9600gt = bottleneck or not

thank for reply

No, if you overclock it.

Post some scores if you go with it. I've been toying with the idea myself.

If you won't overclock the Celeron E1200, it is definitely a bottleneck for 9600GT. If you overclock the Celeron E1200 to 3.2GHZ or higher, it won't be a bottleneck for 9600GT.

The small 512K L2 cache isn't that great for gaming. It hampers gaming performance fairly badly, even with hefty overclocking. XBit benchmarks a 3.4Ghz Celeron on par with a 2Mb L2 cache E4600 at 2.4Ghz:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/c [...] html#sect0

If this is a new build, spring a little more for the E2160 and overclock, but if this is an OEM purchased computer you were thinking of adding a 9600GT too, the performance increase will be tangible, albeit castrated, and your money may or may not be better spent elsewhere.

At stock speeds it would be a massive bottleneck. Due to the small cache and low clockspeeds, a stock Celeron E1200 is a terrible gaming CPU - even overclocked to 3GHz barely moves it into 'passable' territory.

I'd agree with JuiceJones, spend a little more on a E2160, its only about $20 more, but the larger cache makes all the difference in gaming performance.