Bottleneck with GTX460?

[rlb_99]

I recently bought a GTX460 to replace an ATI 5770 that refused to work properly.

It installed well and seems to be running with no problems. I downloaded the latest driver from NVidia. The card is very quiet--the GPU fan never seems to shift into a higher speed.

I have an AMD Athlon II X3 445
4Gigs DDR3 1600
Asus M4A87 motherboard
Antec 500 watts
Windows 7-64 bit

I'm a very light gamer. Some WOW, Dragon Age, Witcher.

The GTX460 is probably overkill for my needs, but I wanted something that would make those games look good, and last me into the next generation of those type of games.

Windows experience gives me a 7.2 on the graphics, I thought it would be higher.

Is there something in my other components that would bottleneck this card?

Thanks,
Ron

 

[yakmar]

Hello,

On what clock does your CPU runs? If stock, it might be bottleneck. X4 would be a better choice to gain fully advantage of the GTX 460.

 

[rolli59]

Your CPU is a good match for the GTX460 but a little overclock would reduce any bottleneck. Windows experience score is nothing to worry about.

 

[neonmonkey]

So would my AMD Athlon II x3 @ 3.3 GHZ bottleneck a gtx 465? I too am looking at a Fermi card.

 

[rolli59]

To me people worry to much about bottleneck. What really matters is do you get better performance than with the next card below it.
As an example AMDX4 955BE with HD5870 beats the same rig with HD5850 but it will loose to an I7 @3.2GHz and HD5870 because of CPU bottleneck in the AMD system.

 

[yakmar]

So would my AMD Athlon II x3 @ 3.3 GHZ bottleneck a gtx 465? I too am looking at a Fermi card.

No, this speed is more then suffience.

 

[OvrClkr]

There will be no bottleneck unless the OP's screen is smaller than 1680x 1050.

 

[rlb_99]

Thanks for your replies.

There will be no bottleneck unless the OP's screen is smaller than 1680x 1050.

Never considered that. I did the Experience rating on a smaller screen, though I do have access to a bigger one to compare.

Why is the smaller screen a bottleneck? I would have thought the higher resolution would slow things. (I don't have very deep computer knowledge.)

Ron

 

[OvrClkr]

Thanks for your replies.

There will be no bottleneck unless the OP's screen is smaller than 1680x 1050.

Never considered that. I did the Experience rating on a smaller screen, though I do have access to a bigger one to compare.

Why is the smaller screen a bottleneck? I would have thought the higher resolution would slow things. (I don't have very much computer knowledge.)

Ron

Windows Experience Rating is a joke, NEVER buy your hardware based on that score. I have dual 640Gb drives in Raid0 which are almost twice as fast as a single conventional 7200RPM drive and Windows gives me a score of 5.9 😉

The lower the res the more stress on the CPU, the higher the res the more stress on the GPU so for instance if you are playing at 1024 res and your CPU clock is at 3.3Ghz you will gain FPS by overclocking the CPU. If you are playing at 1080p or higher you will gain FPS by raising the GPU clocks and in this case you can leave the CPU at stock without having to worry about frame loss.