Hello all, I'm currently looking at replacing my old 8800GT with something like the 560GTX (MSI Twin Frozr from the latest issue looks to be a good bet). At the moment I've got a Q6600 @ 3.2Ghz with 3GB RAM (did have 4, but one stick died). Can anyone suggest how much of a bottleneck (if any) the processor will be if I upgrade the card only - I'd rather not have to upgrade the whole machine unless needed! I've found the following article which is interesting and tests the theory of the CPU / GFX relationship by changing the clock speed of an i7 extreme 965, however with my processor being somewhat lower performance than this I'm not sure how valid it is! Thanks all
What res are you playing at? I would of thought there wouldn't of been much bottle necking. What may affect performance though is running 3Gb of RAM in 3 sticks. This prevents dual channel mode working as effectively as it could.
I'm running at 1920 x 1200 but tend to turn down texture options if I need to improve speed. I did try with just 2 sticks in to see how performance was affected, but I've found that windows worked better with 3 and it appeared to have no affect in game.
Bertiee, there will be a big performance boost going from 8800GT to 560 irrespective. With regards to whether or not the CPU is a bottleneck is a different question, depends on the game. No matter what way you choose to go, the 560 is a great card, though you might be advised to go with a 460 instead just now & bank that cash till later when you can maybe afford to do more with it.
it won’t hold you back too much in most games, when I got my GTX470 I was very underwhelmed with its performance versus my old SLI setup and like you assumed it was my CPU, a 3Ghz Phenom X4 9950, fortunately I was able to compare with a friend with an overclocked i7 who also had a 470 and as it turned out, of course his was faster, his mins were much higher as were his peak max fps but actually the averages rather than the peaks were in only within 5-10% meaning that for a lot of titles the GPU was still the thing holding back performance at 1920x1200 with decent quality settings rather than the CPU. What I did get from the upgrade was the ablility to run more modern games, quite games had poor performance on the 8800 as it was 512Mb and so the system starts to use System RAM for graphics cache, Whole ssytem memory usage when running a game like Metro 2033/Stalker was 5.5Gb when running on 8800GT but <4Gb on the 470, I can only guess as the framebuffer was duplicated in system ram multiple times do to the SLI and spilling over the 512Mb.
Now for the old question - when would be the best time to upgrade? Is there anything on the horizon for the next couple of months which would change my best options from being a 460 or 560 (MSI Hawk or MSI Twin Frozr)? Or any other suggestions are appreciated!
now is the perfect time to buy, other wise you'll be waiting till Q4/Q1, performance is great for the price hit that buy button!
There isn't anything on the horizon really. Both companies have just released their card ranges. Just get the 560, for £195 your getting 480 GTX performance if you overclock, which 9 months ago was £400!
I also have a q6600 and upgraded my 8800gt to a gtx570 at christmas. Works a treat- hard to say if the cpu is a bottleneck, probably not a 3.3ghz. I still only have a 16x pci-e (not 2.0) on my p5k: will that make a difference? Either way i'm going to hang onto my q66 for a good bit longer, no point upgrading unless it's a step change- small increments aren't worth the cash.
Yes, there's likely to be a bottleneck. But will you notice it? No! You'll find your frame rate goes up hugely and you'll be really happy... ....then possibly somewhere down the line you'll upgrade your cpu and then realise you've got a few more fps in all your games, and be pleased. But it will be nothing in comparison to how your rates go up when you changed the graphics card!
As everyone else has said, yes, there will be a bottleneck, but it won't be that much, and it's far, far better than nothing. You'll still get massively increased frame rates.
There will be a slight bottle neck in games such as BFBC but the huge power of the 560GTX will more than make up for it. 560GTX are down to 189 pounds now on scan. Pretty tasty.
I have a C2D e6600 and have just upgraded from a 8800gts 512 to a 560 ti - the cpu will limit your performance a little but I am still able to play BFBC2 maxed out at 1900 x 1080 the difference is amazing its like having a whole new computer. Go for it the 560 is a great card.
