New GPU bottlenecked by CPU - Worth upgrading?

[SpoonedurI]

In anticipation of BF3 & Skyrim (and not to mention spotting a 580GTX for under £300 ) I've decided to upgrade from my ATI 5830.

Now that I've installed the new card I realised that my current CPU, q6600 @ 3.2ghz, is horribly bottlenecking the 580. I'm now having to look at upgrading my whole system instead of just the gpu .

I'm not in need of any extra CPU power apart from gaming so is it really worth going all the way for those extra FPS?

 

[SpoonedurI]

First of all...how exactly do you determine that your Q6600 at 3.2GHz is bottlenecking the GTX580? Have you checked your GPU usage during gaming?

Sometimes the bottleneck can be due the game design with it not using all four cores of the CPU...but for BF3 it is most likely it is design to use four cores or more.

It's worth doing a bit more thorough investigation and testing on your existing system before opening up your wallet.

1) I'm not seeing much of a framerate improvement compared to my 5830 (10 FPS at most)

2) So far I've tested the following games: Crysis, Crysis Warhead, Crysis 2, Metro 2033, F1 2011 and Far Cry 2. I get the same/nearly same frame rate at 1920x1080 with max AA as I do at 1280x720 with no AA.