Will my CPU bottleneck any Graphics card I get?

[Sitting Duck]

I am currently helping my friend build a beast of a gaming rig, and it got me thinking about my own rig.

I am currently running An E7400 Wolfdale and a HIS Radeon 4650 512mb (or 1gb, I can't remember which). I don't have a huge cash flow, and so I can only really afford to upgrade when need arises. I thought about upgrading my graphics card, but I'm afraid anything I buy would be bottlenecked by my processor. About where does my processor start to bottleneck newer cards? As in, which cards are available to me without having to upgrade my processor ?

 

[popatim]

I think it would depend on the game. Games tht only utilize 2 core I think you would be fine, the core2 duo's are excellent processors. But on games that can make use of 3 or 4 cores ...

 

[tecmo34]

We will need to know also what resolution you are running at to determine a possible bottleneck. At lower resolutions, CPU's will bottleneck higher end cards, at higher resolutions, the bottleneck goes to the GPU versus CPU.

In your current setup, I would look at more than an ATI 5770... IMO

 

[Sitting Duck]

@popatim... would you have specific examples of games that I make use of 3 or more cores.

@Tecmo34, I am running a 1680x1050 resolution monitor. I have 2 gigs of, I think, DDR2 memory and I'm running windows 32-bit.

Also, what causes the bottleneck at lower resolution to be the processor and at higher resolutions the GPU? I'm the curious sort

 

[tecmo34]

Here is a video to review... http://www.youtube.com/user/NCIXcom#p/u/1/TGdo75gasaQ

 

[Sitting Duck]

Thanks for the information!