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Will A Q9450 and DDR2 RAM Bottleneck A 7850?

WuMyster

WuMyster

WuMyster

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Hi There guys,

As you can see from the thread title, I am wondering whether or not my Q9450 @ 2.7GHz and 4GB of DDR2 RAM will bottleneck the 7850 badly. I am a student with limited amounts of money and just recently bought a SSD which doesnt help my finance situation. I have enough for a 7850 which I can OC which gives me a very good card since they OC like crazy but how would my bottlenecking reduce my performance? I am getting a new card realistically only for BF3 and future games.
As I don't have much money, if the bottlenecking issues are quite bad then Ill have to wait for a completely new build in a few years as this is a Dell XPS 630i which I spent £700 on about 6 years ago. Since this is Dell, Im pretty sure with their motherboards they locked OCing which really screws me over.

So, how would the bottlenecking impact me? Would it just be a few FPS id lose since some people are saying the Q9450 is still a pretty solid CPU.
If the GPU option was to be the best option then over time I'd obviously move it to a new build and crossfire it.

Thanks for the help.
 
I'd ocuk that 9450 a bit more

I've got one in my boys rig that pulls 3.8ghz 24/7 might be worth picking up a second hand 775 mobo I bought a p35c ds3r for 30 quid last week
 
Delta12 said:
I'd ocuk that 9450 a bit more

I've got one in my boys rig that pulls 3.8ghz 24/7 might be worth picking up a second hand 775 mobo I bought a p35c ds3r for 30 quid last week
Click to expand...

Like i said, I dont think the Dell motherboard allows OCing the 9000 series.

But if i cant OC it do you think bottlenecking would be a major issue?
 
I think any bottle necking would be game dependant it may hold it back but I wouldnt imagine it would be a serious amount
 
I see you want to play BF3, and with single player you would probably max it out fine but in multiplayer maps (especially the 64 player ones) you would most likely dip down to 30fps or so now and again in heavy fighting, although it would be more than playable IMO.
 
SouthEastBlue said:
I see you want to play BF3, and with single player you would probably max it out fine but in multiplayer maps (especially the 64 player ones) you would most likely dip down to 30fps or so now and again in heavy fighting, although it would be more than playable IMO.
Click to expand...

Dip down to 30?! Do you mean this will be rare and the minimum because of high intense explosions and all that or do you mean this will be the average because of my bottlenecks?
 
It's difficult to say tbh as its very game dependant some games favour gpu grunt some prefer CPU power and the rest a varying mix of the 2

A quadcore 775 won't be CPU limited in anything but a handful of games
 
Not threadjacking, but I have the exact same CPU and the same 'question'. How good / bad will it be upgrading with the same system and 4GB of ram, from a 5850 to a 7970?
 
I also run a q9450 at the moment with a mild overclock to 3.2ghz. I run it with a 5770 and I was looking at xfiring with another, or just doing "one last upgrade" on 775 with a good graphics card. There will of course be a bottleneck. I guess a good way to tell would be to look at some benchmarks of the card you are looking to buy, take an average, then run the same benchmark on your system.
Certainly look at overclocking the q9450, as they tend to go quite high on good boards. The OP may not be able to with his sytem. I have a Gigabyte P35C-DS3R up for sale soon if you want it, which will run my q9450 at up to 3.8ghz. Only reason I swapped boards was for an Asus one where I needed a feature on the board.
 
Ive overclocked to 3.0 GHz before with relative ease and then started to have issues with the BIOS, not sure if related or not. I have a good Asus board - so OCing is a real option.
 
The ram will not bottleneck, but the cpu frequency will.

I remember reading a while back that the optimum frequency was 3.6Ghz, after which you see diminishing returns. (Of course more is better - but extra heat, volts etc...)

So I would say get that cpu clocked as high as safely possible.
 
I had a Q6600 @ 3.6ghz and it just just started to bottleneck a GTX580

a Q at 2.7 will definitely bottleneck a 7850, and will mean that any OC you get out of it will be worthless... I would say a 560ti/6950 would be about the highest you would want to pair with it, so either save some money now and get one of those as your last gfx for this system, or save up a bit more money and replace the mobo/cpu/ram

not forgetting that you should get 200+ for your current box just as a working PC
 
I did a BEZL mod on my gf's Q6600 and took it to 3.1Ghz, she also had a locked down MSI motherboard by the manufacturer known as MEDION. Don't know if you can bezl mode the 9XXX series however.
 
Assuming no overclock and going from 5850 to 7970, what 'improvement' will be seen? Im not playing much but would like Guild Wars 2 to be smooth for when it comes out in a few weeks time. Playing the beta has shown me that my current machine struggles a bit.
 
Out of interest, I have a Fenrir Titan (the big mother air cooler), would this be good enough for serious OCing or better off looking at some form of water system?
 
I had the Q9450 overclocked to 3.4ghz and I got bottlenecking with a 6870, when I changed to my 2600k my fps in Black Ops shot up 15%, and that's COD lol.
 
I would not recommend pairing a 7850 with a stock Q9450. My old Q6600 at 3.6GHz (which is faster than your CPU at stock clock by quite a bit) would bottleneck even my 5850...it's not "too bad" in games that would use all 4 cores of the CPU, but for any games that use less than 4 cores that are even slightly CPU intensive would see my 5850 get bottlenecked. But as others have side, it probably wouldn't be too bad if it is just single player campaigns for FPS, but for online play, that's a different story...as there are far more explosions, players and open terrain or detailed structures. As for your question would the dip down to 30s or lower be frequent on BF3 multiplayer 64 maps, yes it would be very frequent, as there will ALWAYS be lots of things going on at the same time, unlike single player campaigns where the AI opponents would only be a few of them at a place at one time nor would they spam explosives.

Your best bet for now is probaby try to find a 2nd hand 5850/6850 at around £60. Save the rest of your money and wait till you rebuild your PC before spending big amount on graphic card. Also, what PSU you got at the moment? Cause PSU that comes with a dell machine would most likely not be good enough for any graphic card that require addition 2 PCI-E 6 pin power (or even a single PCI-E 6 pin).
 
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