Is my cpu bottlenecking my gpu?

[bakekrukow]

Just recently got a Radeon 5770, great card for the money! Performance has been very nice, but I was just wondering if my Core 2 Duo 6700 @2.6 GHz is bottlenecking my performance. Not that I'm noticing any problems, its just that the cpu is almost 4 years old and was wondering if i was to get a new motherboard with a core i5 or i7 if my gpu would expierience a performance boost. Thanks!

 

[wolfram23]

Yeah it probably is hampering you a tad but I doubt it's much. A 5770 isn't high end so in any game you should be able to turn the GPU into the bottleneck by turning up graphic settings until you're at what you want for steady framerates. Unless you find you're getting crap FPS in every game for no apparent reason (settings on medium or low for example) then there's clearly a bottleneck. But yeah, should be ok. You'll be bottlenecked in benchmarks tho for sure. Have you considered overclocking?

 

[hunter315]

Easy way to check, drop the detail settings on your games a bit and see if your FPS improves significantly, if it does you might have a CPU bottleneck. If you have good playable performance right now you really dont need to worry about it. What resolution are you playing at?

 

[bakekrukow]

im playing at 1440x900, but based on what you guys have said i shouldnt have too much of a problem. My last card got fried so im not to keen on overclocking .

 

[megamanx00]

Your CPU is probably holding you back a little, but if you can play games just fine I wouldn't worry about it. You can try turning off more CPU intensive settings, like Physics effects, and see if your FPS go up noticeably. If not, it's likely the video card that is the bottleneck in that situation

 

[hundredislandsboy]

Your C2D e6700 easily runs at 3.33 Ghz by just changing the bus speed in your BIOS. Try that and if your FPS increases then you already know what to do!

 

[bakekrukow]

Best answer selected by bakekrukow.