Amd Phenom 9150E and Ati HD 4850?

Hi guys, would someone be kind enough to help me out. Im new and I just learn about the concept of bottlenecking. My question is . Should I get a new AMD processor to go along with my Ati 4850 or is it enough to bring out the full potential of my gpu. Its 1.8ghz sadly

If so, what processor do you recommend? thx!

If you have a 4850 already id plump for the 7750, which is a damn good value chip.

Most new games like COD5 are fully optomised for quad cores so stay with the quad. I have the 9350e running at 2.2 with an overclocked 8800gt and the cpu usage doesn't go above %50 when playing on a 24" screen. It just depends what Phenoms are going cheap at the moment. You could also wait a month or two for the full lineup of AM3 cpu's to come out.

That's because it's only using 2 cores. 2/4=.50=50%

You're a month behind. AMD already has decent quads out:

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3506

The Phenom II's are 45nm. The Phenom II 920 @ 2.8 and 940 @ 3.0 are AM2+ and DDR2, but new AM3/AM2+ that work with both DDR3 and DDR2 1066 are arriving next Monday. The 3.0 gigahertz version isn't arriving until April though.

There will be several triple and quad cores within a week. What we need to ask the OP is what motherboard does he have (with his CPU, it sounds like an OEM system and not a custom shop or homebuild). Will his motherboard support a Phenom II? Is there a bios update for it? If it's an OEM system, then I'd say not.

OP, you can avoid CPU limitations by gaming at a higher resolution. When the GPU pushes more pixels than the CPU can handle, the GPU slows down. That's the traditional bottleneck. Since a GPU doesn't push as many pixels at higher resolutions, that allows the CPU to be more evenly matched and you get the full benefit of both.

I wouldn't recommend anything higher than a 4830 with a Phenom 9150e. That's more of an HTPC processor than a desktop. It's going into some budget OEM's though.

malcolm k you are seeing even usage in all cores because windows moves your process among different cores not because the program is using 4 threads. Actually cod5 does not use 4 cores.

The average CPU on the market today is still a duel core. We're currently shifting towards mainstream quad cores.

The AMD's are certainly good value and they are smoother in gameplay than the Intels. I hope more people purchase AMD's because they need the sales and without them there would be no competition in the market. Imagine how much Intel would charge for cpu's then.