Can old motherboards bottleneck GPU folding performance?

[totalnoob]

I just bought this card to put in a folding rig, and currently have an old Q6600 + socket 775 motherboard laying around that I was planning to use. I believe the motherboard FSB speed is 1066mhz, and the max ram speed is 800mhz. I'm just wondering if this will negatively impact folding performance in a significant way?

Will the card put out the same amount of work regardless of the other hardware in the PC? Or will a system with slower mobo/RAM not be able to keep up with a blazing fast DDR5 card? If necessary, I will grab a budget i3 mobo/CPU combo, but would rather not waste the money if it won't make a difference.

 

[pandemonium]

Negligible loss in performance when taking into consideration the cost of an entirely new platform. The primary concern here, obviously, is CPU-bound performance, which with a Q6600 you can overclock it a decent amount to help level off its weaker performance against a more powerful GPU. As long as your MoBo supports PCI-e 1.1+ it should be adequate. A comparison is here.

There's a very relevant review with exactly what you're inquiring about from HotHardware.com. I don't read much from there, but the results appear to be sound.

Long story short: it is a viably cheap option for the meantime and you will see gains.

Edit: I just noticed your focus was for folding (duh!). I can't say 100% for certain, but I believe it'll be even less of an issue for folding than for gaming, since folding is either primarily CPU or GPU bound separately AFAIK.

 

[totalnoob]

Thanks for the reply.

 

[petrusbroder]

I had - some years ago - two of the same GPU (GTX460): one was in a Athlon x2 4400 running @ 2.2GHz, the other was in a i7-860 running at 3 GHz (OC'ed). The performance of the GPUs, when crunching over the 2011 Holiday Season Race (a full month) was within 5%. The mix of WUs explains probably the difference...

 

[StitchExperimen]

On a AMD card in F@H the CPU is used just at the start and at the end and every 15 minutes as backup points or whatever they call it. It's left up to the GPU to to run the work.
Now on a Nvidia card it will use part of 4 threads for a total of about 1 1/4 threads. Nvidia also likes fast board memory say 2133 is the most bang for the buck past that is diminishing returns.
You have to use advanced setting to get full access to the 8900 wu's for FAH.