Bottlenecking: CPU and GPU

[tomsega]

Being the empty pocketed student low-life I am, me can't afford Athlon 64. Eventually, though, I do plan on floggin the old AthlonXP and moving up in the world. I was just wondering, have any of you noticed any particularly big differences in gaming performance when you have upped the processor, yet kept the same graphics card?

I was thinking of moving from my 3200 AthlonXP to a 4000 Athlon64 - although I'm gonna keep my 6800gt for a while. Do you think this will improve my FPS that much? Has anyone made a similar upgrade and seen good results?

At the moment I can overclock my GPU to get a 3DMARK05 score of 5300, from a previous score of 4900. Considering I have a pretty big overclock yet the performance difference is low, I'm pretty confident this is due to the processor bottlenecking the GPU a bit.

Please post any experiences or thaughts, if you like.

 

[Jake_Taylor]

If ur game works fine why waste 300 quid if it is laggy get the upgrade nothing is worse then laggy games ...... my experince is with pentium cpus only as intel is so sexy

 

[Alf]

Being the empty pocketed student low-life I am.

well, you speak highly of yourself .

Im sure a 4000 will give you a preformace boost but im not sure of how much of a boost. but a 4000 is much more powerful than a 3200.

 

[Me__2001]

the big difference will come from the new motherboard, the CPU will make a difference but the majority of games are pretty dependant on the graphics card

give this a read its very interesting

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/28cpu-games.html

 

[tomsega]

Hmmm... interesting...

Well according to that link, if I were to compare my XP 3200 to the 64bit 3000, I'd be looking at up to 20 frames more per second if I upgraded to a 4000+. Plus, they benchmarked new games like F.E.A.R - so I'm sure slightly older games will improve greatly in comparison.

Thats a pretty big difference, really. Certainly a much bigger difference than any amount of GPU overclocking is likely to give anyone. The fact that I have skipping in some games despite having a gig of pc3200 is probably linked to the CPU as well.

 

[Me__2001]

you do realise they are using a 7800GT ?, you will get a noticeable improvement but it wont be close to the fps they were getting

 

[tomsega]

you do realise they are using a 7800GT ?, you will get a noticeable improvement but it wont be close to the fps they were getting

Yeah I did, but I meant the more conservative side of 'up to' 20fps! Sometimes the 7800gt got over 30fps more... so okay, maybe 10-15fps.