Pentium D bottleneck

HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Sorry I'm lacking sleep lol.
That PD would hold it back big time.
If the mobo supports it then he should upgrade to a Pentium Dual Core E5200: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6819116072
It seems like it would be a downgrade but PDs suck and Core 2/Pentium Dual Core cpus provide double the performance per clock.

It will be bottlenecked. How much varies as it could be a dual core with hyper threading model down to just a single core with no hyper threading. Some games will suffer from the weak CPU more than others. Overall though he probably wouldn't see too much of a benefit from getting anything faster than a Radeon 4830. If the PSU is weak just go with the 4670.

I'd still go with the 4850, but there will be a bottleneck. I think the Pentium D's were all socket 775, so he might be lucky and be able to plob a mid-range Core2 in there as a cheap upgrade...

Thing is his parents arent allowing him to get a newprocessor only a gpu. And im talking about 1024*768 0x AA-he has a 15 inch monitor

Whats that supposed to mean?

He'll get about 33-40% of the cards raw performance.

However, things like AA, HDR and ansiotropy are all handled entirely on the graphics card. So he'll be able to crank those up without dinging his frame rate. Downside is he'll never go above the modest frame rates.

The severity of the bottleneck will also vary dramatically from game to game. Keep sound quality to low and make sure any physics is set to low or turned off. Also make sure his power supply can handle it. Older systems especially brand name systems, will frequently lack the amperage on the 12v rail to handle the more recent cards.

eta: just noticed the very low resolution, it'll be severely bottlenecked that low. Probably score around 4500 +- 500 points in 3d mark '06.