HD4870 bottleneck problem

Hi guys,

first of all happy new year 2009 to you all

Here's the specifications of my pc I'm currently using.. some components are way older but had to keep them you know...

CPU - Pentium 4 3.0Ghz Cedar Mill
VGA - Sapphire HD 4870 512Mb
Ram - Kingston 1Gb DDR2 667Mhz x 2
Mobo - Intel DG965WH
PSU - Zalman ZM750-HP 750w

I had to play games at 1024*768 resolution because of the 15" monitor I'm having. Currently playing prince of persia 2008,farcry 2 and nfs undercover. I noticed even that at this resolution when I set the graphics settings to max, some places in the game it runs well but sometimes it gives me performance issues.

now this is weird, I also tested the prince of persia 2008 and nfs undercover with max settings at 1440*900 but had the same issues with the performance. I mean I feel that the game performance is same at both resolutions.

I suspect that this is a bottleneck for the GPU so I've searched a bit on the net regarding this problem and there some people says that to avoid a bottleneck you must have atleast q6600 (stock clock is ok) or C2D higher processors. I don't know about my mobo and ram but hope they are ok for this GPU..

what do you guys think about this issue ? this mobo DG965WH has no OC facilities and the best processor it can handle is the q6600 ( fits to my budget also ). I'll think of buying the q6600 but please I need to make sure whether I'll be able to play games at 1024*768 and 1440*900 with max settings after buying q6600.

I found this thread also
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] mb-problem and the output from the unigine is shown below.



Please let me know your opinions about this issue. thanks and sorry for the long description..

^+1
Also running Vista with only 2gb of RAM is a problem

Apart from the processor you`ve got a good gaming system

Go for the processor upgrade, but check here to ensure it`s comatable.

http://support.intel.com/support/m [...] 026598.htm

I would go with the E6700 also.

But I suggest you to just save up for a new mobo, CPU and RAM all at a time.

mehcrim, I provided a link to all compatible Core 2 CPUs for that motherboard (http://processormatch.intel.com/Co [...] me=DG965WH ), but unfortunately the E8400 isn't on that list. He'd have to buy a new motherboard along with an E8400 (which is what I'd do).

thanks for the replies guys anyway would you think that I can get away with good performance in games if I use q6600 and also avoid bottlenecking the HD4870 .because this board doesn't support e8400 the best option for me is q6600 ( I couldn't buy both the mobo and cpu so I'm hoping to get a q6600 for now and later I'll OC it with a new motherboard ) .

Nah, 2gb + vista = a big problem.

Vista uses 1GB itself, which means you'll have 1GB of RAM left for other tasks.

Q6600 pretty much sucks for gaming. E8400 is THE gaming processor.

Once again, I suggest you the save up for a mobo + new processor + new RAM all at one time, just to get the best out of it, instead of buying weaker components all apart.