Upgrade time, bottleneck?

[SeeKified]

I'm in the process of planning an upgrade for my girlfriend's system. The spec as of now is:

Athlon II X2 250
HD5670
4GB PC3-10666 (2x2)
760G or 880G board

She doesn't want to spend much, so this is what I came up with. My question is, would that CPU bottleneck the 5670 at all and how are the Athlon IIs for gaming? She plays quite recent Source games quite a bit.

 

[SouthEastBlue]

If it's only for source based games I doubt it will be held back much. That said both the CPU and graphics card could be hold backs depending on what other titles were played as some prefer more than two cores at a higher clock with more cache, and other games would rely more on the graphics card.

 

[SeeKified]

If it's only for source based games I doubt it will be held back much. That said both the CPU and graphics card could be hold backs depending on what other titles were played as some prefer more than two cores at a higher clock with more cache, and other games would rely more on the graphics card.

Okay, that sounds alright then. She's got a 17" monitor, so she'll be playing in 1280x1024 as well. I was considering getting a Phenom II 555 and attempting to unlock it, but it costs a bit more.

To be honest though, she's currently on an A64 3000+, a 7600GS and non-dualchannel DDR (2GB). Bottleneck or not, it should be a pretty hefty lift for her system.

 

[feeddagoat]

If you roll of graphics settings and that doesnt improve frames then there's a cpu bottleneck. Also if you increas graphics setting and frames don/t drop then theres likely a cpu bottleneck. Really it comes down to is that bottleneck dropping frames in a way or to a level that the game is unplayable?

I use an athlon x2 6000+ and GTX260. They would be around the same performance and apart from the new vagas part of fallout: new vagas or 8+ enemies on screen, I havent had a problem gaming on it. I ususally run tvcatchup while gaming which is fairly tough on the processor, its those ocassions i would boarder unplayable. I also game at 1680 x 1050

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I assume that the OP has a decent quality PSU??

 

[SeeKified]

She's on a 300W OEM thing that came with the system from HP once upon a time. Many things have changed in that computer since then, but I don't think the PSU's one of them.

Outervision's PSU calculator says the setup in my first post'll need about 270W. I'll double-check the amperages on the current PSU though...