Will my CPU bottleneck a GTX 480?

of course it will depend on the game but I would think that any bottleneck that may occur will be a very minimal one, you might be looking at a few fps difference but who wants to spend 500 dollars on a high end i7?? If you ask me the 955 is one of the best gaming processors you can have and there are certainly people that run 480s with less of a cpu than that. Overall i would excpect very low no to bottleneck

It depends upon the game. Some games rely more on CPU compared to other. You might find this article helpful:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/game-performance-bo...


In short, except in some rare situations, you wont notice a bottleneck

Thanks for the quick answer... yeah I don't think it will be much of a bottleneck and I agree, the 955 is awesome for the price

+1 to snurp85 that about sums it up, especially at high res most games are more gpu demanding, but definatley having a real quad core like you have will do nothing but help your cause and i would say 3.6 is a pretty good clock per core, you will be fine and happy with the 480 upgrade, afterall the 768 mb 460 is not much better than a 5770 in relative performance whereas a 480 will be at least double the performance on your gpu basically you will get similar performance (but more minimum fps) to having the 768mb 460s in sli.

Interesting article, thanks

Even a 4ghz i7 will become a bottleneck at some point so don't worry. It is sli and playing at low ress ware a cpu doesn't hold up very well and it will be at least another year to two years before games like GTA IV become common that make it lag like a Slugtium 4. So go ahead and get your GTX 480 and enjoy your rig. As for mine try living with a low clocked 8250e @ 2.7ghz