Will my amd phenom 9850 bottleneck gaming?

What resolution will you be playing at? If you are playing at high resolution the graphics cards will be working hard enough they wont hit the bottleneck, if you are playing low resolution then yes they will be bottlenecked but as long as the bottleneck is over 60FPS is doesnt affect anything.

Overclock that CPU! XD. Should go to at least 3.0ghz. I have a 9950 which is the same but with 2.6ghz clock speed to 3.2. Do you have SB750?

I'm playing in 1080p. and I can't overclock too far because I don't have good cooling

I got to 3.0 on stock cooling. Whats room temp? And good air flow case? But anyways, what hunter said is correct. What i'm wondering is what you're gonna need two 5850s for XD. Why don't you buy one now and an aftermarket cooler?

Then you shouldnt hit a noticable bottleneck. The 9850 tops out at significantly higher than 60 for every game in the charts section here except GTA IV where it got 52.5 which is pretty damn good. You wont hit any effective bottlenecks with that processor.

terrible air flow case!!!

was that on stock voltage also?

Yea stock volts too.

Temps didn't go up much with overclocking on stock volts. You could try core temp and if you're below 60 load you're probably good to go (although under 55 would be more ideal)

i suppose i could try...
honestly I've never overclocked a CPU before

Also if you don't have a good motherboard, I might not risk overclocking. I had a cheap one break on me before...or maybe i just got a bad one

Theres lots of good guides, toms wrote one awhile back for overclocking phenoms

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/phenom-overclock-at...

my motherboard is kind of old. it's an asus m2n68-vm. I'm getting a new one sometime soon though. and thanks for the link