Worried about CPU Bottleneck on HD4850?

[quadomatic]

You can see my system specs in my sig.

I was wondering if the HD4850 will be bottlenecked on my system. People have been saying that it's even held back on an E8400, so I'm a bit worried about my system (with the OC its about an E6600? Not sure if its close the E6600 or E6750, but they're about the same).

Also, I have 2GB of ram, not 4, which I also had read would be a slow down.

I think it's also important to note that I play games at 1280x1024 usually, though if I could I would play at 1600x1200, but that's not important. I also don't really use AA, and its not really important, but it would be nice (But, I do have an X850, so I guess I still have a card from the realm when 1280x1024 was good, and AA was very much a luxury).

Should the HD4850 be my first choice, or should I go for something cheaper that would achieve the same performance under my setup? I guess the physics processing should be considered with this choice too, but im not positive.

 

[cubeless]

4850 would be a great match for that chip @ that speed... great time to upgrade to that card with it being $145 for the sapphire model right now @ newegg (see hot deals thead)...

u can upgrade to a faster cpu later and probably get a bit more perf in ai heavy games... people are always going to spew about some thing not being powerful enuf... your cpu @ 3ghz is about <5% slower than a 8400... you will be amazed at the performance improvement over the 850...

unless u have a bunch of crap running in the background 2gb on xp should be fine...

u should be able to run crysis (dx9) @ 1680 with everything but postprocessing on high and stay over 30 frames...

 

[DaveSimmons]

4850 is a perfect card for a 3 GHz core 2. 2 GB RAM isn't holding you back much if at all since you're still running XP -- it's Vista that bloats away an extra GB.

 

[taltamir]

some games require more then 2GB for the game itself. Those games will be held back (especially in 32bit where a single app is limited to 2GB). Vista only adds 500MB of ram over XP (which is less the the extra ram it can address in 64bit)... and there is always XP64 that can address all of it without the vista bloat (and vista is really A-OK since SP1... XP was also terrible before SP1 and even 2)...
so you will be getting at least an extra whole GB of ram if you upgrade it. That will be the number 1 improvement for some games. While irrelevant for others. But it is also a cheap upgrade.

This CPU looks to be balanced with a 4850... If going above that I would upgrade it to a quad core Oced to 3.6ghz, but for a 4850 and most games the two should match up really well.

However, for SOME games extra cpu power is required... check this thread here:
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...=2205375&enterthread=y

 

[bob4432]

i use to think 2GB was good enough even running @ 1280x1024 - my machine is a e2160@3.0 and a 3850 running @ near 3870 speeds on 32bit xp. my machine idles @ ~350-400MB of ram. when running an older game like company of heroes, i go over 2GB to about 2.25GB. i am assuming it is because everything is maxed out but i was surprised it went that high. now running 3GB of ram and it is normal to hit over 2GB when gaming cohf, i would imagine the newer games need more, especially @ 1680x1050 w/ a card that has enough power to push up the details/textures.

 

[taltamir]

Check out that thread I posted.. I added some hard data from FRAPS showing CPU bottlenecking. At least in Mass Effect (the game I tested), but people there have mentioned other games too.

 

[quadomatic]

Thanks for all the replies, bumps for more opinions?