Bottle Necking

[ShawnSum]

Hi everyone, im new to the site and i have heard many theories on CPU's bottlenecking GPU's. I tried to search for a comparison chart of some kind but i had no luck. I was wondering if anyone could help me out on the info im trying to find.

Im running a Athlon 64 3500+ with Dual 6800 GT's and ever since hearing about the whole bottlenecking thing i have always been a bit curious if i was bottlenecking anything in my system. Core components listed below of my specs.

Asus A8N SLI Delux (939)
Amd Athlon 64 3500+
Corsair XMS 3200 DDR400 (2 Gigs) 4 sticks of 512mb
Raptor 74gig 10,000RPM HD
Creative Audigy 2 ZS
(2) XFX Nvidia Geforce 6800 GT's


All help is greatly appreciated!

 

[theteamaqua]

no i dont think so...

a good GPU + Intel's netburst is bottleneck

like mine GeForce 7800 GTX + Pentium D 920. K8 is a good marchitecture, but ull prolly need to upgrade it soon if u want to play games at max resolution

 

[aka1nas]

Well, it often depends on the game and how much CPU horsepower the game requires. Oblivion, for example, is bottlenecked by most CPUs at resolutions that current video card can actually run that game decently at. To illustrate, look at this anandtech benchmark:

Benchies

If you look at the second two graphs, you can see that after a certain point (In this case about a 7800GTX) the performance increase starts to level off even though the other cards should be much faster. This is most likely because the CPU (an FX-60, which is no slouch) is unable to process data fast enough to keep up with the potential speed of the faster video cards.

Now, most games are not so CPU-dependent, at least at resolutions that you would want to play on with a high-end card. Your 3500+ is most likely acceptable for your setup.