Bottlenecking with a Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 Yorkfeild 2.5GHz

keithdawson

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Feb 17, 2012
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I have a fairly nice Asus desktop that I like to use for gaming. It has an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 Yorkfield 2.5GHz possessor, 8GB of DDR2 RAM and a bunch of hard drives. What graphics card (if any) will bottleneck this system. I am thinking about building an extremely expensive gaming beast, but it may be a good idea to keep what I have and just add a really nice graphics card. Thank you.
 

mildsend

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Sep 2, 2011
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If you want to upgrade your vga then you need to upgrade you psu too..
for 1680x1050 pixel resolutions pick 6670 DDR5 upgrade your psu to 500watt..
for 1920x1200 pixel resolutions pick 6870/ geforce 560 non ti upgrade your psu to 550-600watt
 
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Deleted member 217926

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I think you will start seeing the low clockspeed of that processor bottlenecking a card around the GTX 560 Ti / HD 6950 range.

If you have aftermarket cooling and a decent motherboard you could probably overclock that processor to the ~3.5Ghz range and get a pretty decent bump from that.

If not an i5 2500K/2550K and 8 to 16GB of DDR3 would be a pretty powerful upgrade.
 
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Deleted member 217926

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A 6670 needs 400 watts tops and a GTX 560 Ti needs 550 watts max even including overclocking the entire system.
 

keithdawson

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Feb 17, 2012
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I have upgraded my PSU to a 600W and I would love to use DDR3 memory, but my MOBO will not support it. I would also love to overclock my processor, but it isn't unlocked. I would be happy to get a fairly nice aftermarket cooling unit if I could overclock.
 

keithdawson

Honorable
Feb 17, 2012
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10,510
I have upgraded my PSU to a 600W and I would love to use DDR3 memory, but my MOBO will not support it. I would also love to overclock my processor, but it isn't unlocked. I would be happy to get a fairly nice aftermarket cooling unit if I could overclock.
 

keithdawson

Honorable
Feb 17, 2012
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10,510
I have upgraded my PSU to a 600W and I would love to use DDR3 memory, but my MOBO will not support it. I would also love to overclock my processor, but it isn't unlocked. I would be happy to get a fairly nice aftermarket cooling unit if I could overclock.
 

awallmtb

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Aug 6, 2009
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The fact that your processor isn't unlocked isn't too big of a deal. You can change the FSB frequency to overclock it (just pay attention to the RAM speed and change the ratio of memory speed to FSB if needed).

Also, you may want to have a look at this article:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/build-balanced-platform,2469.html

It's a couple years old but you might gain some insight on what kind of bottlenecks you might run into. Depending on how high-end you go on your video card and whether you overclock your CPU, you might be able to squeeze another GPU upgrade in on your existing platform, but I would guess anything above, say, the HD 6800 series might be held back by your CPU. Definitely depends on the game, resolution, and GPU though...