How much of a bottleneck will the Core 2 Quad Q9550 be for the gtx 950 or gtx 960?

[saif magdob]

My PC Specs:

Windows 7 Professional
Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550
Ram: 8GB
System type: 64-bit
Video card: GT 520 2GB
Motherboard: Asus P5Q-E
Resolution: 1920x1080

How much of a bottleneck will the Core 2 Quad Q9550 be for the gtx 950 or gtx 960?

 

[RaDiKaL_]

A lot, I had a Q6600 @3.4Ghz with a HD 4850 1GB (much older than gtx 950) and used to get around 40fps in games like Assassins Creed 3 and CoD MW2. Keeping the same HD4850 with my current FX-8320 (at stock clocks) I got 80+fps in those games at same settings. Obviously your newer GTX 950/960 will suffer even more than my old HD4850 with your CPU.

 

[blazorthon]

Modern games prefer faster cores than a stock lower end Core 2 quad has. Overclocking would help, say around 4GHz, but otherwise you may be limited in what games you will handle well. It also depends a bit on what RAM you have for the old Core 2 CPUs. They benefit a lot from the DDR3-compatible boards since their memory controller is built into the motherboard instead of the CPU like modern CPUs.