CPU vs GPU bottleneck

banja · 9 Dec 2011 at 10:50

I'm buying a second hand PC next week to tide me over for a year or so. The CPU is a pretty lowly Q8200. The graphics card I'm going to stick in it is a Nvidia GTS250.

My thinking is that these two will suit each other just about right, and that a much higher end CPU will be held back by the graphics card anyway (for games). Am I about right?

kissenger · 9 Dec 2011 at 10:55

Depends on the game. For BF3, for example, the GPU is the most important factor and any half decent quad won't be too much of a problem.

Sasahara · 9 Dec 2011 at 11:05

The GTS250 is on par with an 8800 GTX, you could run a faster gpu without too much of a bottleneck on the Q8200. Particularly with games that can use 4 cores.

banja · 9 Dec 2011 at 11:19

Thanks. I guess my question is - a better CPU would possibly be wasted anyway with the gfx card I have?

Marine-RX179 · 9 Dec 2011 at 11:27

banja said:
Thanks. I guess my question is - a better CPU would possibly be wasted anyway with the gfx card I have?

Depending on the games. Take source games for example...they are hardly graphic demanding, but they scale very significantly to CPU speed, particularly due to them not using more than two cores.

When I was using my 9800GTX+ (basically a GTS250 before rebranding), on Left4Dead 2 my Q6600 on 3.6GHz was noticably smoother than on 3.0GHz.

Sasahara · 9 Dec 2011 at 11:51

Depends on the games you are playing. Some are more CPU bound than GPU.

Wow is the classic example of a CPU bound game.

The q8200 isn't bad, but compared to the current de facto gaming CPU the i5 2500k it has about half the performance, but that's a complete system change.

IMO it's not worth changing the CPU for another better LGA775 CPU unless it's an amazing bargain, the best LGA775 Q9650 is roughly 50% faster.