Is my new video card being bottlenecked?

I am getting 7950 marks in 3dmark 06. System specs are:

Pentium Dual core e2220@2.4GHz
Geforce 9600GSO (768mb)
2GBram
Vista

If I overclock the 9600GSO's core from 550-700mhz the marks only go up to the low 8000s

It is not the CPU!
how fast do you think 9600 is ?! This is prety much good result for that card;

Not fast enuff..
What I mean is... its the CPU bottleneck.

It's your CPU. It's one of the relatively low end Intel duals for the budget market.

I used to have an Athlon X2 4600+ with my 3870x2 and only got around 9400 or so in 3DMark06. When I upgraded to triple core 8750, I went up to around 12000 or so. The clock speed for both processors is 2.4 gigahertz, but the 8750's extra core and higher IPC made a difference.

Xbit Labs has a review of Core 2 based Pentiums compared to several Core 2 Duo's, the Athlon X2 6000+ and the 8750:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/c [...] e5200.html

It's fine actually. I would be more suprised if you got about 9000 points in 3DMark06, since 3DMark is primarily CPU bound. Due to the CPU test included in the final score.

This thread is depressing, the amount of noobs is shocking, you should all really, really, really be ashamed.

Exceptions are yonef and stridervm.

it's a fcuking benchmark, you cannot be bottlenecked!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It is impossible to be bottlenecked in anything other than a game!!!!!!!!

It is also 3-d mark, instead of herlping him understand that he should be worried about games and understand what a bottleneck is you and most other pandered to the OMFG you need to overclock that b!tch to over 3ghz!!!11!1!!!!!!!

FFS, i am astonished you cannot even see what is wrong with this thread.

Yes, but synthetic benchmarks aside, he's bound to be bottlenecked with that CPU in actual games. That's why I linked to real game results using the same card plus a much better CPU. Those he can compare to his in game results.

I mentioned in my post that the addition of extra cores makes a difference in the synthetic benchmark. No one benchmarks even a budget or mainstream card with a low end CPU, they all use high end duals or quads from Intel for their benchmarking platform. That was the point I was trying to make in showing the improvement with extra cores from my experience.

Maybe Futuremark's products should just be banned from discussion and people would just ask why they're getting such low framerates in Crysis or Call of Duty 4? That would please the purists who think that a CPU can't be a bottleneck in a synthetic benchmark.