CPU bottlenecking my vide card or something else?

how old is it? could easily be the cpu since they have been making pentiums for a long ass time, and some games like skyrim are getting more cpu demanding.

I would say pentium dual cores will bottleneck most of the high end graphics card, can we get a specific model of your cpu? Typically in modern days quad cores are recommended for gaming but dual cores can play modern games too but have lower fps.

a pentium g630 is on par with a Phenom II 965 sadly, so actually it really depends.

I'd like to see some benchmarks that verify that... with a decent card.

Some system specs would be helpful. Otherwise, we're just speculating and guessing.

Sure about GTA IV or FSX? Those games need 4 real cores to get to the realm of playability!

Not "especially with a good graphics card" rather the OPPOSITE. The better the graphics card, the more LIKELY it is to fail to reach full performance if the CPU is too slow and can't send it the instructions fast enough.

Your CPU isn't broken. When they die your computer crashes or won't start at all.

Whether a game is bottlenecked by your CPU depends on the following:
a) Which game you are playing.
b) How good the Graphics Card is (a lower-end card may not be bottlenecked).

I'd imagine even an HD6870 (or the game itself) would be bottlenecked by many games with that CPU.

As for GTA IV, I have a really good system and I gave up trying to play it because I just can't hit 60FPS without really cranking down the quality. I've spent hours trying to tweak it and gave up.

*There are plenty of great games (some old, some new) that don't need the best system to run:
- Angry Birds series
- Torchlight 1 and 2
- Diablo 3
etc

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-fx-pentium-a...

the pentium g630 is on par with the 955, and the g860 is above it!