9600XT bottleneck?

[WorldIndustries]

What would be an average system that would NOT bottle neck a 9600XT? I know this isn't a state-of-the-art card, but I would not consider myself a gamer by any means, I just use my computer for general usage, audio editing, and older games.

But right now I'm using a Celeron 1.8 GHz, with 512+128 MB of DDR266 RAM. And I'm guessing this is limiting my video card, as I'm not able to get very good framerates in even older games.

I'm thinking of upgrading to an Atlon 2800+ 64 bit, with a gig of DDR400 RAM. Would this drastically increase performance? I'm pretty tight on money lately, and I'd like to be sure if the upgrade would be worth it.

 

[reggie_da_man]

Dude, drastically doesn't even come close to the word to describe the difference you'll notice. Although I think that it would be best to get an Athlon 3000 socket 939. What's your budget?

 

[slick_tech15]

You should see a very big performance increase. I mean, a 1.8 Ghz celeron is crazy slow.

 

[john3]

..................didnt we already clear this up, gaara said that cpus cannot bottleneck a GPU.

 

[Merkwürdigeliebe]

..................didnt we already clear this up, gaara said that cpus cannot bottleneck a GPU.

whaa? of course they do.. everything that the gpu processes eventually is proccessed by the cpu. that's what i always thought... amiright?

 

[john3]

r u sure? that what was the long a55 post that gaara made about this CPU/GPU Bottlenecking business?

 

[Nitestick]

you're taking gaara's statement out of context. for starters you don't want to take ridiculous scenarios to prove him wrong ie 7800gs with K6-II or something like that. generally the bottleneck isn't due to graphics its due to the fact that the games with higher graphics need more cpu power for physics etc

 

[Merkwürdigeliebe]

you're taking gaara's statement out of context. for starters you don't want to take ridiculous scenarios to prove him wrong ie 7800gs with K6-II or something like that. generally the bottleneck isn't due to graphics its due to the fact that the games with higher graphics need more cpu power for physics etc

yes, actually, that makes perfect sense. I haev a 9600XT myself, and playing CS:S, I only get 20 FPS whether I'm at completely bottomed-out graphics (DX7.0 mode and turn everything off through autoexec.cfg) or completely maxed out at 1280x1024 res, AAx6, Anistropic x16, all details set on high, HDR, color correction, vsync, the works... Obviously, my 1.6 GHz P4 and my 512 Mb of PC100 SDRAM are insufficient to process the physics and scripts in CS:S, the average person would see that as bottlenecking, its not really. The graphics are being processed fine, just the physics and scripts aren't... and man, I have one **** of a time at trying to host a local game to play with bots, even just having one opponent pretty much destroys this crap PC of mine.