Will My Cpu Hold Back These New Graphics Cards?

[Warby35]

I will be upgrading my video card from a HD3870 to either one of the new high end cards on offer, I will of course wait a while until they have been tested propery, then make my choice - be it red or green

 

What I need to know is will a Phenom 9850 @ 2.8 hold back these beasts in any way?

 

I really hope not, but thought I'd ask just to be sure

 

Ta Warby

[cirro]

i haven't run into any games that have made 100% usage on my quad yet and thats at the 2.4ghz stock. i personally doubt it

[Repr]

even a normal dual-core is enough to run all gpu's at full speed. the phenom wont have a problem

[Verran]

i haven't run into any games that have made 100% usage on my quad yet and thats at the 2.4ghz stock. i personally doubt it

This statement is sort of weird. What are you basing this on?

 

Obviously most games won't max out all four cores, but that's an SMP software design discussion and shouldn't really figure into the bottlenecking debate. I find it hard to believe that you can't top out whatever core a game is running on though, especially at stock speeds.

[cirro]

when i consider 100% usage i consider all cores in it. wether it be 2 or 4 100% means to me everything (all cores) running 100% aka prime95.

 

i dont even know that many games designed to use all four cores properly.

 

now if i was using a game that used processing power such as like prime95 and tried to run a game thats what i consider a CPU bottleneck...

 

COD4 doesnt even get near, but then again i think thats a game that utilizes 4 cores.. :\

[Verran]

That's a very odd and misleading way to talk about bottlenecking.

 

By that rationale, pretty much no card (or even set of cards) in existence can bottleneck a quad. Any quad. Even a 1Ghz quad if it existed. Because unless the game was built to run on four cores (VERY few are), then usage will always be 25-50% on the whole cpu.

 

I guess I see where you're going with that, but you seem to be missing the question. The quad will still be the bottleneck in the sense that a faster clocked chip would allow the video card to perform better.

[xly15]

 

I will go with what they both said. They both make good points. The higher clocks are on a cpu the better the gpu performs.