Upgrading 8800GTX - MOBO limited at PCIe 1.0

Hi All,

I built my system around 3 years ago and now feel it requires a little refresh – I don’t have the cash to build something from the ground up so I have been looking into replacing my graphics card as it will make the single biggest difference to performance. As you will see from my components below, there are quite a few bottlenecks kicking around – my question is therefore at what graphics card point does it become pointless spending anymore – i.e. will getting an HD7970 give me any performance improvement over a GTX 570 in my system - and if so, to what extent? Also will a PCIe 3.0 card even work in my PCIe 1.0 mobo (I know that’s a difficult question to answer – supposed to be compatible but no bios update for my mobo since 2008!!!).

My budget at the moment is around £300 and I intend to buy just after kepler is released (I am guessing prices will tumble on the rest of the graphics card field - if the rumours are even half accurate)

Components:
CPU = Q6700 OCed to 3.1GHz
Mobo = ASUS P5KC (yes I know it’s very old) (PCIe 1.0 at x16)
Mem = DDR3 1333
PSU = 700w
Display resolution = 1920x1080 single monitor
No intention to run in SLI or Crossfire

Any advice would be appreciated

Thanks

Hello. If you plan placing a GTX570 on PCI x16, I can guarantee you that you will have no problem from the card. Its like having it on PCI 2.0 x8, where all 1155 boards do this on sli. But anyway a GTX570 cannot fully use the PCI 2.0 x16 and the drop from PCI x16 is only smthng like 1%... I can post some sites if you want.
I have the Q6600, PCI x16 too and when a game goes to heavy gpu processing, I see same numbers as with anyone. But our limit is the cpu. While in Dragon Age 2 (a heavy gpu game and almost ignoring cpu) I have same numbers as an 2500k, but at skyrim I have very low framerates when it uses cpu.
My opinion is if you want to wait for ivybridge and kepler. With £300 (and maybe a few more by then) you could buy a mobo and an ivy cpu (you already have nice ram) and then take a GTX650ti or GTX650 which is rumored to have teh same performance:

Hello again. It depends on graphic engine how it will use your pc sources.
As you can see here (Dragon Age 2, AMD favor game) a GTX 570 run the game on 34fps under 1920x1200

But as you see here the CPU on this game can be only bottleneckd by a 6990 that instead of 74fps, has 66. So at this game I suppose a Q6600 might not even bottleneck an SLI config of GTX570.

Comments of the reviewer: "For the most part it appears that Dragon Age II is primarily GPU dependent. Any current Core i3, i5, i7 or Phenom II processor will be sufficient to get the most out of your graphics card. Even the old Core 2 Quad performed well. Keep in mind we are using the Radeon HD 6990 to remove a potential GPU limitation, so there will be even less of a margin when using slower graphics cards. "

Now about if Nvidia really pull off +45% 7970 performance, I dont know. But the facts saying that they can do it. Actually they did it many times in the past.
The trick here is not how much performance will have over 7970 but over their previous generation GTX580. I think they did with 7xxx to 8xxx and from 9xxx to GTX2xx and from GTX2xx to GTX4xx. Last example was the performance increase from GTX 285 to GTX480 was more than 50-70%. To be honest I am little dissapointed from AMD.
They didnt repeat the great performance jump they did with 5870. Do you remember how fast 5870 was compared with 280? I hope they re-release or update their firmware at least to increase the clocks of 7xxx series. Also when 5870 was at the stores it wasnt so pricy. So we had HUGE performance over 48xx while the cost was if I remember well $380. And now we see from Nvidia to follow AMD with these ridiculusly high prices, by placing 4 SINLGLE GPUS over the $300 tag.
Lets hope this will change.