Bottle Neck a 955

[DrBoomstick]

Hey there guys.

Thinking of upgrading my Graphics Card fairly soon to give me a bit of a boost.

my question is, what kind of graphics power would it take to make my AMD Phenom II 955 @ 3.4 the bottle neck?

Thinking about maybe upgrading to a GTX 570.

Thanks in advance guys.

 

[chaotic_russ]

i would say not as i was running a 955BE @ 3.6ghz until i upgraded my cpu 2 days ago , running a 6970 here though so not 100% the same

 

[PurpleTrance]

I'm running a 955 @ 3.75Ghz. My 570 arrives this evening. A little unsure as to how the two will go together but i'm expecting some decent results.

There may be a 'slight' bottleneck, but if i'm getting a smooth 40-60fps on all the latest games with high settings, it won't really matter too much.

There is no denying that an i7 would push the card more, but i think i can live with my 955 for at least another year or so, provided it doesn't restrict my new card.

Should be faster than my current Gtx 460 setup anyway.

Will post again soon to let you know how i get on.

 

[Rastalovich]

People really need to use this term bottleneck less.

There was a test done on somewhere like TomsHardware some time ago where they took an old c2d and twinned it with something like an 8800 ultra to overclock the crap out of both of them and see where the jump in performance trailed off.

It took something like a Q6600 4ghz before the rate of increase for the card didn't impact as much. Which in itself isn't a "bottleneck", it's how relative the overclock for the cpu needs to be before it becomes less of an aide to assisting the graphic card's drivers. The summary effectively came out with as soon as the Q6600 got to 3.8ghz, there was little benefit in taking it further for gaming. Nothing to do with holding anything back. (this is from memory, I wouldn't swear to the exact numbers. it could've been 3.6ghz for example or an E6400 or whatever)

Similar tests have been done with quads versus duals. Artifical tests scoring better with the quads, but in real gaming sense nothing to be seen here.

You could get into issues with a pentium 4 or athlon k7, but in all honesty I'd look at the infrastructure before looking at the cpus.

 

[SmoulderingCircuits]

My 5770 went from 18fps with maxed crysis and a Phenom 9950 to 20fps with a 1090t. You really don't gain a lot from a processor unless the game is dx11, which is two figure fps boosts! However dirt 2 used to max out my processor but now only uses a third of each core. Some games would cut out half way through a loading screen on the 9950, but that's all sorted now

 

[DrBoomstick]

cheers guys, pretty sure I will be ok with that now.

Might have to grab myself one in the next month or two.

 

[PurpleTrance]

Card runs fine. Pushing my chip to 4Ghz has helped a little though. Getting great performance on all games, and still a little headroom to overclock to card further.

No signs of a any bottlenecks so far