Pretty straight forward question. Will my E8400 @3.0 GHz on a P45 MB bottleneck the performance of a 570gtx by a lot? (I understand there will be some bottleneck, I just wanna know will I see the majority of the performance the 570gtx offers). I am of the opinion that I'll see all the performance from a 570gtx seen as it is a full PCI Express 2.0 slot that it would plug into. I just don't know for certain. The way I look at it is a 3 GHz processor is still a 3 GHz processor when it comes to gaming. I would like to put off upgrading my chip set a little while longer if i can, while still being able to play new games at high settings.
I would say it's Bottleneckd but not by a huge amount. You could buy a 2nd hand C2Q like a 6600 overclock it to 3.6ghz then your good to go...
If you play alot of BFBC2 then it will be bottlenecked quite heavily by the E8400. The P45 board itself isn't an issue. It should still provide more than playable framerates you just won't be seeing the full benefit.
Fair enough, if you're playing very multi-core dependent (3+ cores) games, you're going to lose a bit of framerate here and there, but at that resolution, you shoulnd't be too concerned. Worst comes to worst find a Q6600 or a Q9xxx chip, overclock it and you'll be set for quite a while.
+1 to this. BFBC3 and Battlefield 3 are heavily multithreaded. In most other games you should be golden.
i don't think we are answering his question... the issue wasn't "will my e8400 offer good performance on heavily multi-threaded games with a gtx 570 compared to a quad?". it was whether or not his e8400 will bottleneck his gtx 570. of course a quad core or hyper-threaded dual core is going to offer better performance in those types of games. that has nothing to do with a "cpu bottleneck" that's like saying the 2500 is going to bottleneck your gtx 570 in heavily multi-threaded games vs a 2600k... this should give you some perspective...i'd say at your rez, with no oc, with high settings, it would be minimal to some slight bottlenecking...nothing i'd go upgrade crzy over, and expecially not for another 775 cpu...
Since my idea is to spend as little money as possible by only upgrading the gpu, and after reading the article on Tom's hardware that trig linked, I think I'll be safe with only upgrading the gpu. Granted the data in that article is a little dated in that games nowadays are better optimized for quad core cpus, I still think my e8400 is up to the task of providing a 570gtx card the data it needs to shine. Thanks for the read trig I was looking for something like that.
Would you consider overclocking? That chip is a demon in games when overclocked so that will help with any bottlenecking that may occur.
I have considered it a lot, but I am bad at it. I have a good heat sink and air flow and really any hardware requirement needed, but when it comes to tweaking out an overclock I am bad.
You don't need to worry about a bottleneck - the GTX570 will be fine in your system. As for oveclocking the CPU... Firstly it depends whether or not your CPU is an E0 stepping; the c0 E8400s barely reached 4GHz but the E0 steppings regularly reached 4.5GHz+ (on a good motherboard and with good ram). Secondly your board isn't great and it has DDR3 which won't likely OC very well, so tbh I'd say it's not worth bothering with an overclock. Just get the nice new graphics card and enjoy it
