Bottleneck Question

[Ruckas]

I've been reading about bottlenecks. I'm curious, they mentioned it like this. Lets say 2 guys are loading a truck. The guy actually loading the truck is 6'5 250 pounds, and the guy bringing the stuff to load is 5'1, 100 pounds. Obviously it would take all day.

I have a p4 1.5 (socket 423) and I'm thinking about getting an ATI radeon 9500 atlantis (so I can play around with the overclocking.) I was hoping some of you guys could tell me wether or not it's going to bottle neck really bad.

O' and I have 512mb 800mhz RDRAM. All 4 ram slots full.

Thanks alot, Ruckas-

 

[Ruckas]

Well? Anyone care to help a dolt out? That'd be great, thanks.

Ruckas-

 

[ScrewFace]

Your 1.5GHz Pentium 4 is definately going to be a terrible bottleneck for you. The RADEON 9500/9700 and even my GeForce 4-Ti4400 have alot of room to grow and won't run optimally and at full power unless you have something like an overclocked ATHLON XP 2400+ or a Pentium 4 2.4GHz or higher.

 

[Serp86]

yes, it will be a bottleneck - but since i have a p3 1ghz and a radeon 9700pro - i can't really comment

 

[nick1985]

pentium 4 1.5? gross...

 

[tapir]

it won't be HORRIBLE.. it's still worth the upgrade.

 

[vss1980]

Yeah, as tapir pointed out, while its not gonna be setting the world on fire, the upgrade is not a complete waste. This isn't a situation where the card will show no benefit over another slower one at all, and the combo should show a decent turn of speed.

 

[titanmiller]

Yes, your processor will be your major bottleneck. I am running a 1.2ghz Athlon and in Game Test 1 in 3dMark2001 I get identical fps with my GF4 Ti4400 that I got with my GF2 Pro. However in Game Test 2 (dragothic) I get much higher fps with my "new" card than I got with my old card. In BF1942 if I set up a network game and am the only person in there I see around 70-80fps which is what my Video card is capible of, however if I run in single player mode and crank the bots up to 200% I get less than 16fps. Assuming that my processor was not the bottleneck I should recieve (nearly) the same fps as when there is no AI.
I would guess that a 2.4ghz p4 or better would be needed in order for the 9500 not to be bottlenecked by the processor.

 

[Ruckas]

Excellent. All very good replies.. I'm shooting for maybe 10,000 3d marks in 2001. You guys think that's possible? With the 9500, and the p4 1.5 (423)?
And serp, what kind of 3D mark score do you get with that setup? I checked your setup link and it doesn't have that statistic.

Thanks alot.

Ruckas-