GPU Buying Help

[Guest]

I've been looking to buy a new Graphics Card lately, and while I have my eyes out on a few cards, like the GTX 460, I'm worried it will be bottlenecked by my CPU. However, I've become increasingly unsure with the fact of how much a bottleneck will matter. So, my buying range is up to the 230$ 1gb GTX 460, and if you would like to take the time to recommend a card based on my specs/games I play please say so. I really just want to buy the cheapest card possible for the performance, instead of having wasted power all the time.

Currently I'm running:
AMD 64 XII at 3.1ghz (I'm willing to OC this to around 3.4/3.5 at the most, I have pretty good cooling and it should be stable, hopefully...
4GB DDR2 RAM
Nvidia 8600GT (lol ) 512MB
350 Watt PSU (Im going to replace with a 600W one).

I play:
Generally on 1280x1024 for games like SCII, but 1600x1200 for WoW. I mainly play WoW, SCII, soon to be Diablo 3. (Play most of my other shooters on consoles, but I love blizzard games).
I would like a card that can support SCII on ultra because by looking at the Diablo 3 settings, it seems to be less graphically intensive then SCII 3v3 or 4v4 match.


Anyways just looking for a bit of recommendations, I've been looking to buy since my card is ancient, I'll be sticking around for a while and if you have any other questions feel free to ask.

-Thanks for the help ahead of time.

 

[mister g]

Your PC's specs are better than mine :-(. Anyway from what I here from some reviews of SC2 you're going to want that GPU because SC2 can both be a very economical game for budget PCs and be able to make gaming PCs sweat. As for the CPU don't worry about it it'll only bcome a bottleneck once you start adding a second card to your system, in which case you might want a quad core CPU.

 

[Vearo]

Stay a while, and read!

http://www.techspot.com/review/305-starcraft2-performance/

For relative card strengths:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-geforce-gtx-480,2598-6.html

I built a new rig for myself just recently, and purchased a 460 1GB. Mind you, I also plan to play games such as Mass Effect 3 on a higher resolution than 1600x1200.