Best card that wont be bottnecked with a athlonX2?

You could go as high as GTS250/9800GTX+ or HD4850

I agree with above, if you go any higher then your CPU will be the bottleneck. The GTS 250 is a very nice card as it is very fast, does not consume huge amounts of power and is also relatively cheap. The HD 4770 is another very good card, especially if you are planning on overclocking it however there are many issues with drivers currently.

The 4770 is faster than the 8800GT/9800GT and anything faster probably won't show an improvement in most new games because you'd generally be CPU limited, well unless you have a really high resolution monitor or something. With such a low CPU clock speed I'd really recommend you look into overclocking though if you want to play games ^_^

Oh i probably should have mention that it would be at 1650X1080. OC'ing is really and option, becasue athlon X2's DONT overclock. Oh well its not my computer, Ive got a 3.8ghz c2q  .

...unless your beating around the bush and saying vaguely that his motherboard has no options to overclock than you are so far wrong...there is software overclocking as well...im not trying to be super offensive but this gets me torched when people go giving help when they know NOTHING and you apparently have no idea on the hardware at hand...

My OEM! Lenovo A61 with an AMD 4400+ is on a 400MHZ software overclock...running GTA IV on my 9800GTX+ @ 830MHZ just fine....X2's are still kicking it for me   considering this is the most demanding game cpu wise im extremely impressed by what this system is giving me

And i believe if he overclocks the say gts 250 to pull the most out of it and his cpu he should be able to handle games at that resolution decently...but his stock cpu clockrate will slow him down so if he overclocks it should boost fps quite a bit...

Im sure youv went and boasted that you can help him out and find out what he needs...If you really value this friend and REALLY want to help him out i suggest you direct your friend here if he wants true hardware help and recommendatioms because you are certainly not qualified for much of any help and would only be doing harm to the situation....

You also haven't listed the other specs for the pc...such as psu and ram not to mention can he run these gpu's at a cool enough temp....ram plays a big factor here with games like gta iv although iv ran farcry 2 and most other titles flawlessly with 2gbs...

But i seriously doubt your in this to help him out...

Oh my! Were shall i start?

#1. When i said that athlon X2's DONT overclock, i probably should have said that they don't overclock well. The most i could get out of this particular cpu is 250mhz before i have to start raising the voltages like crazy, which is hardly anything. I certainly possess the technical skills to overclock a cpu, in fact my wireless router is overclocked   . Im typing this on a computer with a cpu that is overclocked by 60% (2.4-3.8). I could go on.....

#2

Know nothing? hardly, I built the computer. I could name all the hardware in it off the top of my head. "Im not trying to be super offensive but this gets me torched when people " jump to conclusions, especially when all the information you have on my personal and technical competence is 3 sentences on an forum.

#3

Once again jumping to conclusions based on 3 sentences on a forum is generally a bad idea.... I certainly did offer to help him upgrade, he had mentioned to me that he might like a gfx card, so i explained to him his options, and did some research. I Just came to get a second opinion, because while a do know a lot about computers i am far from perfect.

#4

Once again, in addition to being blatantly insulting, this is also you jumping to conclusions. Owning 6 custom built computers and enough parts to start up a small tech shop, i am fairly confident in my technical abilities. If i wasn't i wouldn't be giving him advice.

#5

I didn't because i didn't think they where necessary. I assumed that people would infer that the pc had a capably power supply and since 2 gigs of ram is implied nowadays and has nothing to do with the topic i left it out.

#6

Dear god, what kind of altier motive could i possibly have for helping him upgrade his pc? If you honestly doubt im trying to help him, then what do you think im trying to do?

Hmmm i wasn't so impressed by the typos in your posts so that also was an assumption that you would be of a much younger age thus capable of teenage stupidity and lacking yadda yadda....hmm i expected too much of the sterotyped fanboy from your posts and your mis type on overclocking...

Ahwell....it would seem your capable *claps*

Im always so harsh on the assumers...now im assuming  

there is no clear cut bottleneck point for the cpu. it varies with each game. gta IV will show a cpu bottleneck fairly easily. a game better coded for use of the gpu, will not.

and then theres the whole factor of resolution. raising resolution doesnt increase cpu load, just gpu. so, where this magical bottleneck line is, varies, lots.

theoretically, you could take a game entirely off of the cpu (or for right now, lets say close to), where would the cpu bottleneck be then? (nvidia dreams and aspires to this, ha. so does intel tho... interesting times ahead [dont count amd down either, they just havent started unifying the same way yet.])

if you are banging your cpu off the ol' 100 percent limiter, it has hit the line. (assuming the game is coded to use all your cores properly, this is never the case with 4 cores.)

Heh I wonder too if I crossfire my ( which I am going to in a few weeks ) HD4770 on this motherboard ( which I still need to buy ) ASRock A790GXH/128M If it will become bottlenecked by the AMD X2 6000+ @ 3.14 Ghz...

Oh wow i did make some stupid grammatical errors in my first two posts .
I even screwed up the tread title   I really need to start proofreading my posts   .

@neon neophyte: Yeah i know bottle necking varies by game, AA, AF, and resolution don't affect cpu load. Actually the reason why i was so concerned was that i had recently helped (another) friend built his first computer, with a e6600(quite a bit faster then the athlon) and a hd4870. And he was getting about 35fps in fallout 3 until i OC'ed his cpu to 3.2ghz, now he gets 75 constantly. Kinda weird though because ive seen fallout on a 2.4 athlonX2 with half a megabyte of cache and it wasn't cpu limited at all on the same settings. Oh well.

@tijmen nobody likes a dirty thread hijacker, but i would guess that you might be cpu limited in some games with 2 hd4770's. I would still get another one though, you can always upgrade to a phenom 2 later,....  

My 2.4 Ghz X2 5200+ bottlenecked my old 8800 GTX to a degree, but I didn't notice until I popped a 3.2 Ghz X2 6400+ in.  

Last fall I upgraded to a factory OC'd GTX 260 (192). Waste of money with the 6400+ on a 22 inch monitor. I saw almost no FPS increase. The 8800 GTX was really all it could handle.

With your friend's PC I'm guessing he has an X2 4050e if its 2.1 Ghz. Definitely no barn-burner. If my X2 5200+ couldn't make full use of an 8800 GTX I would think he couldn't help but bottleneck something like an HD 4850 or GTS 250 with his (with the disclaimer I'm speaking generally - no one knows for sure).

HD 4770 is about all I would put in it. Its most likely all the GPU his PC could handle, plus its cheap, thrifty on power and cool running.

i dunno much about the athlonX2 series but have you looked around for another CPU that would fit your socket that could up your performance a bit?

yeah, the bus sizes do negate the ram types in this instance.

its like (x) x (y) = (z) with x being ram type, y being bus bitrate and z being total memory bandwidth.

the gtx 285 has more memory bandwidth. by a bit.

fallout3 is a very extreme example of a game reliant on cpu and not gpu.

pretty much every videocard will run that game at the exact same fps. while the cpu changes it dramatically.

That is just about spot on...my 4400+ gets a huge performance increase going from 2.2 to 2.6 ghz...it plays fallout 3 like a dream oh i love it so much  

If i where you op i would suggest either spending an even 200$ and buying a 4770 at 100 or 110$ and upgrading the cpu to a nice amd 6400+ which has gone down in price on newegg so its like 10$ more than an 6000+...or you can usually find the amd 6000+ used on ebay for 50-70$ either that is the best of the best on the old X2....if his board can support it you should look at the 7750 as it can overclock to the same speeds and a little past the 6400+ but his board of course has to support it

Whilst the 7750 is cheaper his motherboard most likely won't support it....hmmm im not so sure does it require a different board compared to a normal x2?....i need to do som eresearch  

That would be the best method in my opinion seeing as you said you couldn't get more than 200mhz out of his current chip and any of the 6000+ and up chips will get you to 3ghz...another option is also picking a high chip ie like the 5800+ from the 5 series and overclocking that to just around and between 3ghz and 3.3ghz...that would be another option as you can of course get that one of new instead of a 6000+ used at around the same price


Sorry for the assumptions earlier its just these days you see more and more morons screwing people over buying the wrong tech and wasting cash left and right....seems like your buddy is in good hands   not to mention you could of been one of the guys who buys someone a 100$ card and charges them 200$ for it  


Just find out what your buddys budget is exactly and work from there...if you went for a 5800+ at 67$ and that is such a sweet deal imo and a 4770 he could definitely have some decent performance before a jump to a tri or quad core is needed...of course stuff like that requires new everything so yeah...


Edit: i just wanted to add that if his board is of course bad at overclocking you would of course want to start with a higher clocked chip in the first place..do yeah i strongly recommend the 5800+