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Upgrading from old 9800gt

Snaggles

Snaggles

Snaggles

Associate
Joined
3 Apr 2013
Posts
3
Hey all,

I'm looking to upgrade the wife's graphics card, the current spec of her PC is as follows:

E8400
4GB Ram
Gigabyte P35-DS3
9800GT
1080p monitor

She only plays LOTRO but unless she selects low to medium graphics, the game flickers quite badly, so I thought I'd upgrade the GPU. Thing is, will that E8400 be a bottleneck for say a 660ti and mean I'm wasting my money?

Any suggestions welcomed, would prefer Nvidia to ATI but thats based on my previous experience with a 4870x2, so maybe I'm being unfair.
 
The E8400 will be bottlenecked by the likes of a 7850 let alone a 660TI. If she only wants to play low settings maybe a 7770.
 
An i3 sandybridge with Hyper Threading will bottleneck a 7850 so anything worse than that will provide a severe bottleneck.

Bacon? said:
The E8400 will be bottlenecked by the likes of a 7850 let alone a 660TI. If she only wants to play low settings maybe a 7770.
Click to expand...

A q8200 @3.0ghz slightly bottlenecks our HD7770 OC in our other pc.
 
Bottleneck is a word thrown around far too often on computer forums imo. Yes an e8400 won't get the best from a modern GPU but it will be a darn sight better than a 9800GT. I'd go second hand tbh, pick up a 5850/70, 6850/70 or GTX470/560
 
Thanks for the fast response guys, up to this point I'd thought 660ti and a small SSD to help things along. Not sure what to do for the best now!

I suggested a system upgrade and she thought it would be a waste of money, hence I thought a GPU upgrade might do the trick. Maybe a 560ti then for 130 quid? I know my old 4870x2 in a similar rig could run it mostly maxed, presumably a 560ti is a fair bit quicker than the 4870x2?
 
d_brennen said:
Bottleneck is a word thrown around far too often on computer forums imo. Yes an e8400 won't get the best from a modern GPU but it will be a darn sight better than a 9800GT. I'd go second hand tbh, pick up a 5850/70, 6850/70 or GTX470/560
Click to expand...

Its gets thrown around as that is so. As you have clearly just explained in your post.
 
DigitalPrime said:
Its gets thrown around as that is so. As you have clearly just explained in your post.
Click to expand...

However its not the CPU causing the bottleneck, its the whole CPU/board/chipset/DDR2 package as a whole. A E8400 is clock for clock faster per core than Piledriver, however a system is only as strong as its weakest component or feature set.
 
A Q6600 @ 3.6 with the double the cores of an e8400 will bottleneck to a fair extent a 5850.

So I would stick to something around that speed, probably the 7750.
 
With 5850s being so cheap second hand, it's hard not to recommend one IMO. I ran a 5850 and e8400 back when it launched. Later "sidegraded" to an OC'd Q6600, saw little benefit then, until BFBC2 really
 
flinco said:
A Q6600 @ 3.6 with the double the cores of an e8400 will bottleneck to a fair extent a 5850.
Click to expand...

Are you sure about that? a Q6600 at 3.6GHz is close to FX-4300 performance, in fact in multi threaded apps its actually better than an FX-4300 due to having four cores as opposed to four integer cores. Are you saying that the FX-4300 (A current AMD CPU retailing for £95) cannot support a 5850 or equivalent?
 
ubersonic said:
Are you sure about that? a Q6600 at 3.6GHz is close to FX-4300 performance, in fact in multi threaded apps its actually better than an FX-4300 due to having four cores as opposed to four integer cores. Are you saying that the FX-4300 (A current AMD CPU retailing for £95) cannot support a 5850 or equivalent?
Click to expand...

Yes. In BF3 which you could say is multi threaded, the 5850 would be limited to around 80% unless on the edge of a map looking away from the centre.
 
Snaggle said:
Thanks for the fast response guys, up to this point I'd thought 660ti and a small SSD to help things along. Not sure what to do for the best now!

I suggested a system upgrade and she thought it would be a waste of money, hence I thought a GPU upgrade might do the trick. Maybe a 560ti then for 130 quid? I know my old 4870x2 in a similar rig could run it mostly maxed, presumably a 560ti is a fair bit quicker than the 4870x2?
Click to expand...

System upgrade if you can convince the wife.
If not perhaps a second hand quad and a 5850 or 5870?
 
Good move IMO, they are about 3 x the grunt of the venerable 9800GT, even with the world ending CPU bottleneck you'll see great results :p
 
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