Will Sli'ing my 460gtx bottleneck?

[kittenpirate]

Hello,I have the money to spend on another 460 but I don't know if my cpu can handle it?

System specs:
4GB RAM
680i Nvidia gaming motherboard
2.93 intel dual core
460gtx se graphics card
320gb hard drive
120gb hard drive

 

[megadelayed]

Hello,I have the money to spend on another 460 but I don't know if my cpu can handle it?

System specs:
4GB RAM
680i Nvidia gaming motherboard
2.93 intel dual core
460gtx se graphics card
320gb hard drive
120gb hard drive

what dual core have you got, ther are a few 2.93ghz models

 

[renz496]

is it E7500 (2.93Ghz, 3MB L2 Cache)? if that's the processor you got then just go with one GTX460. even with that you still need to overclock the processor to eliminate the bottleneck effect.

 

[nforce4max]

775 builds are only good enough for a single gtx 460 or 280/285 without there being any noticeable bottleneck. Don't go for it just save your money for a rebuild mainly cpu, board, and ram.

 

[megadelayed]

775 builds are only good enough for a single gtx 460 or 280/285 without there being any noticeable bottleneck. Don't go for it just save your money for a rebuild mainly cpu, board, and ram.

he'll have a quite server bottleneck if its the e7500 if the e8400 and the q8xxx bottleneck gtx280 or faster, he could see if theres a q9550 available cheap and upgrade his cpu.
but theres always the chance he might have a g6960(2.93ghz, 3mb l3) or a i3 530 (2.93ghz, 3mb l3)

 

[nforce4max]

A q9550 is not a cheap cpu and is very overpriced. They are also hard to come by now days.

 

[renz496]

he'll have a quite server bottleneck if its the e7500 if the e8400 and the q8xxx bottleneck gtx280 or faster, he could see if theres a q9550 available cheap and upgrade his cpu.
but theres always the chance he might have a g6960(2.93ghz, 3mb l3) or a i3 530 (2.93ghz, 3mb l3)

judging from the motherboard he have i don't think his processor is i3 530

 

[megadelayed]

judging from the motherboard he have i don't think his processor is i3 530

sorry i missed that thanks for correcting
@nforce4max
if the op can get a cheap 2nd hand or oem q9550 for about £60-70 then i would be quite good value and it saves him upgrading his cpu and mobo and probably ram and only getting similar performance to his build upgraded to a q9550

 

[Mousemonkey]

sorry i missed that thanks for correcting
@nforce4max
if the op can get a cheap 2nd hand or oem q9550 for about £60-70 then i would be quite good value and it saves him upgrading his cpu and mobo and probably ram and only getting similar performance to his build upgraded to a q9550

It won't be much good if the OP's 680i board is like mine and doesn't have BIOS support for 45nm Quads.

 

[benski]

Having shopped for a q9550 recently I can tell you you will not be finding one for 60 or 70 euro's, 200 bucks used is about as cheap as you will find.

 

[benski]

As far as a bottleneck it just depends on the game, some games run faster on my e8500 than my q9550 because they can only use one or 2 cores, but for the most part SLI in those games is the difference between running 90 fps or 150fps, so there's not alot to be gained.

Best way to test is run a game that you think isn't running fast enough at different resolutions and see if it makes a difference. If a game is struggling at your res and gets better when you lower it SLI could help. If lowering resolution doesn't improve FPS then a GPU upgrade would be useless.

 

[kittenpirate]

Best answer selected by kittenpirate.

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey