4800+ (939) and 8800gts 512

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I had a game that wouldn't play on an older video card. I swapped out an 8800gts 640 card into a machine with a 4800 939 running at 2.6. It was slower than the Intel machine with the 6850 in it, but the game performance was there. I'd recommend it.
 
I think no matter what CPU you have it will "bottleneck" a higher end video card. It just depents to what extent. The faster CPU you have the better the video card can function and the more fps you will get. So that "bottlenecking" argument is sort of bias in a way. Yes there is a point where your CPU just isn't giving you the potential your video card has but you can graph the peformance per cpu and its a curve.

Besides that. I think you will be fine. I have a buddy with the same 939 4800+ cpu you have and he runs an 8800GTX and it screams. Way better than his 7600GT sli setup.
 


Finally, a thread with some good advice about CPU and GPU bottlenecking.
I get so irritated reading threads like this when someone says "don't buy a high end card for your Athlon 64 or Pentium D CPU, it won't be worth it, your CPU will bottleneck that GPU and it won't run for crap"

All I can say is yeah, people definetly take this whole "bottlenecking" nonsense to a completley new level of stupid.
It is more of an issue to realise it's maybe time to stop throwing money into the old system and just build new, but
a new GPU will always increase your performance by leaps and bounds over a 2-3 year old card no matter what CPU you have.

 
And even if you don't get the performance you want or need, you can always carry the card over to the new build if you do that later.
At least if it is a PCIe card.
When we start talking about AGP, I do lean towards at least getting a newer motherboard so if you are spending money on a better video card, you can carry it over.
 


What Jay2tall said was totally correct.

But, there is a point where a CPU just won't keep up with a GPU. For instance, I had an old A64 3200 that was paired with a 7800. I could have gotten a 8800 to go with this, but I knew that most games would need a little more CPU power than my 3200 could provide. I would still have seen SOME performance improvement, but no where near what the card would have been capable of. So, instead of doing that, I did a full upgrade to my PC, AM2 x2 4000+, 8600 GT, 2gig DDR2800 and a new mobo. I did it for less than what a new 8800 GT would have cost me (I had a budget). Yes, the 8600 is nowhere near as good as an 8800, but my old CPU wouldn't have run much better with the 8800 than the 7800.

People just need to know there is a point where your CPU is going to affect how much you see in performance gains from a new GPU. But, you are also right jitpublisher, people tend to over exagerate how bad bottlenecking can be. Usually it is the "leet" OCers that think that anything less than the most expensive Intel CPU is absolute garbage and say things like "your x2 5000 will probably bottleneck...blah blah blah..."
 

correct, they most certainly do. The road just gets slightly narrower with older cpu's but it's not like someone puts a brick wall in the middle of it. Sure if you have an old Pentium D or Athlon 64 semptron or whatever they were a highend card is not going to perform on par with a newer CPU. But it's still going to run like a champ. I usually recommend people with Pentium D's get a moderate Core2 or Athlon x2 chip. Some games are more CPU intensive and can really take a hit with graphics. Supreme commander is a memory and CPU hog, to name one. As someone posted before, if you upgrad the video now and get better performance. You can later upgrade your CPU/mobo and get even better performance. Not eveyone has a full piggy bank.
 
Only reason i ask is b/c my current setup gets about 9,050 marks on 3d06 and 30 fps avg on crysis @ all high and i was curious if i could get a noticable increase in fps by upgrading to say a 5000+ BE.

I lost my overclocking ability with my cpu when i updated the bios for my MSI board, which really got under my skin. I upgraded from a 7900gtx 512 which actually got higher frames in some of my dx9.0c games which i found strange considering the new g92 architecture and all is supposed to be so badass.

PS Thanks for everyones input on the topic
 

Why don't you flash your BIOS back? I had an issue with this on my asus and went back to an older version. No issues then. Unless you needed it to fix other items.

To put in perspective. I had my current system with an OCed x1900xtx card (with the OC it probably sat around what your card performs) and I was getting a 3Dmark06 score of like 7,xxx something. I installed the 8800gts and at stock was getting just under 13,000 and with the OC I get about 13,200. So if that is any prediction of what you will see.... Stuff will blow up WAY BETTER!
 
First, I agree with what Pauldh said; he mentioned that if all the eye candy is turned up then the CPU is not much of an issue if any at all. This is true I think, I am running and X2 4200+ (socket 939) and upgraded my vid card to an HD3870. I have used a few utilities to watch CPU performance with newer games like COH and COD4 as well as Stalker and none of them are close to fully utilizing my CPU if I turn up the eye candy like you have done on Crysis. Crysis is GPU bottlenecked with the current graphics technology available. I am not planning on building new for at least another year. Thats why I bought something which had DX10.1 capability as well as SM4.0...why build new all the time? Just because we can? Makes no sense at all to me but whatever....money to burn I guess.

BTW: thanks for the little piece of information on your MSI bios update...I have long since hated MSI boards and that just reinforces it! Their graphics cards are decent, though I never did get my rebate back from them!
 


I have the gt 512 and it is a dream to be able to use this system for gaming for 1 more year :sol:
 
When you play games at 1600x1200 and up...usually the gpu does the most work. I play eve-online at 1680x1050 on a 22 wide with all the eye candy up and the game still rocks at an average of 80-100fps.
 
Well in order to flash the bios back i need to get a floppy drive and do it some kind of complicated mixed up way that seems like a lot of trouble. I don't even own a floppy drive nor know anybody who does, so i guess i'll get around to it eventually but atm, i'm stuck without OC ability on my CPU

The GPU is a different story and that's OC'ed to 735core/1836shader and 1052 memory in Riva
 
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