Will my system bottleneck my ATI 4870?

[ZachWills]

Hey, I'm getting a computer for christmas and I want to be sure, before I buy it, that there won't be a bottleneck anywhere. I plan on using 1 ATI HD 4870 on this system:

http://3btech.net/spamdat64duc.html


I would be upgrading this to 2gb of ram, the 700w power supply, the dual core amd 250 3.0ghz, and a 500gb HD. If you need anymore info, please let me know. I plan on playing WoW with this machine, and if it turns out the video card can be used at its full use then I plan on playing other games as well. Thanks for all your help!

Also, I am open to getting a different video card, as long as I can blow WoW away

 

[Raidur]

You'll be fine with the Athlon II 250. Also, 700w is overkill for your system. 400-500w on a quality PSU (stick to brands like; Corsair, Antec, PC Power@Cooling, OCZ) should be plenty.

A little overclocking wouldn't hurt anything. Try a couple 100mhz increases and see if your FPS goes up by much, that will let you know if your CPU was/is bottlenecking your 4870.

 

[enzo matrix]

+1 for raidur. Agree completely with the power supply. I'd go with 500W to be safe but that's just me lol. I have a 600W OCZ powering a system with 2GB DDR2, an athlon 64 3200+ and integrated graphics. Got it for a really good deal something like $40 after rebates. (I do plan to upgrade my components though so...)

Tom's did a really good article on this a little while ago actually. The athlon IIx2 250 falls below the 550 black edition but you can see from their charts that the radeons seem to do really well with lower end CPUs
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/balanced-gaming-pc,2477.html

Your card would fall between the 4850 and the 4890. You could benefit from a better processor, especially in some games like GTA IV but with the exception of GTA IV, the difference would be negligible most of the time and definitely not worth the cost.

And I agree with the overclocking, if you're willing to overclock you could easily bring your performance up to matching or exceeding the 550 BE.