How severe is my bottleneck?

[LewisCBR]

This is my build and its already done and most of it was free from friends who had these parts laying around, so i had no choice in the matter. Please redirect all 'you shoulda bought this' comments to someplace where i dont care.

i7-860
8GB DDR3 SDRAM at 1333MHz
GeForce GTX260
1TB Serial ATA 2 Hard Drive 7200 RPM

I'm pretty sure i know the answer is my vid card. Its a, what, direct 10 2 year old card? It will be the first thing i upgrade when i get some money, so what would be a comparable direct 11 vid card to the rest of the system?

I'm very big on trying to balance my machine. If my vid card is wasting my fast processor or vice versa i like to try and get it play nice together as best as possible. I.E. i dont want 32GB of RAM, or the latest i7 with a crap vid card etc, whats the point.

My vid card knowledge is def lacking and i get confused when i research so thanks for helping.

 

[MU_Engineer]

This is my build and its already done and most of it was free from friends who had these parts laying around, so i had no choice in the matter. Please redirect all 'you shoulda bought this' comments to someplace where i dont care.

i7-860
8GB DDR3 SDRAM at 1333MHz
GeForce GTX260
1TB Serial ATA 2 Hard Drive 7200 RPM

I'm pretty sure i know the answer is my vid card. Its a, what, direct 10 2 year old card? It will be the first thing i upgrade when i get some money, so what would be a comparable direct 11 vid card to the rest of the system?

I'm very big on trying to balance my machine. If my vid card is wasting my fast processor or vice versa i like to try and get it play nice together as best as possible. I.E. i dont want 32GB of RAM, or the latest i7 with a crap vid card etc, whats the point.

My vid card knowledge is def lacking and i get confused when i research so thanks for helping.

That build looks perfectly fine and reasonably well-balanced. The GTX260 is not all that old- that's the GTS250 you're thinking of. The GTX260 is a pretty powerful card and the fact that it doesn't support Direct3D 11 means very little today. By the time games actually need Direct3D 11, the GTX260 will need replaced anyway.

 

[Raidur]

Are you unhappy with your gaming performance?

Your i7 may be able to handle a much stronger GPU, but that doesn't necessarily mean its a bad thing.

If you want to upgrade you graphics the best bang for buck dx11 capable at the top end are the 5850/5870/GTX470.

But like MU said, if it isn't broken don't fix it! If you are happy with your current performance stick with that, DX11 isn't going to make your games look much better.

 

[Wolf_Leader]

lol. 32GB of RAM

 

[LewisCBR]

I think you can get a Macbook with 32GB of RAM but its about the most expensive computer in the world, ha.

 

[MU_Engineer]

I think you can get a Macbook with 32GB of RAM but its about the most expensive computer in the world, ha.

Yes, since you would need a MacBook with four DIMM slots instead of two and support for registered memory, which the MacBook does not support.

 

[LewisCBR]

I think i meant a mac pro, not mac book.

 

[LewisCBR]

But anyways, i am happy with my gaming performance, it all runs great. I sort of just needed to know what would be the next thing to upgrade next year. I think the vid card would be next and then i could overclock the CPU, once that starts to be old hat it will be a complete system overhaul again.

Thanks.

 

[seanny]

Your slight bottleneck is the #260.Still a powerful card.My question would be how much of an upgrade do you want??Budget i would go for a 5850,but to be really honest there are places you can get an awesome PowerColor 5870 or an XFX 5870 for a little under $400 dollars.Games that are coming out now support directx11 so the ATI cards are where to go at the moment.