I'm having some issues trying to figure out what I need to upgrade and if its even worth it. I have a 9800gt and would like to upgrade to a GTX 460, i have been doing some research and I am nor sure if I need to upgrade my CPU or not. I'm running a q6600 Quad core right now , 2.4ghz , do i need to upgrade to a higher speed in order to use the GTX 460? I have 8 gigs of DDR3 RAM 1066 mhz. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. :biggun:
nope just buy that GTX 460, what res you play at? maybe you should do a little oc(3.0ghz) to enjoy that GPU 100% at low res ddr3 1066 and LGA775 socket? hmm maybe you have DDR2
I play at 1920 X 1080 resolution , just bought an 24 inch monitor. OC my CPU , uh I am not really sure how to do that. Yes DDR 3 1066 , LGA775 socket
you should be fine with that card@1080p unless you want a second one for sli, then you have to overclock that Q6600
Had SLI 8800GTS 512 with my E8200 @ 3.4Ghz got above 13000 on 3d mark vantage. Went to 460GTX overclocked to 900/2000 and get 18000. Games seem to play better Vsync every game at 1900x1200 and get much better AA/AF performance. Look at OC that CPU though I assume you have an intel mobo?
I don't know about Q6600 overclocking so I'm just asking out of curiosity: is Q6600 base clock shared with RAM? doesn't that make OC'ing with DDR3 1066 a bit tricky? Or does Q6600 come with unlocked multiplier?
As other have said a single GTX460 will work great with Q6600. At the point when you need to upgrade performance in games again it's probably time to upgrade the processor as well, so I think you're going to be fine without overclocking, gaming wise. Overclocking does have benefits in overall performance though, with a moderate overclock you can achieve a noticeable increase in performance without much of an increase in power consumption. And some folks think it's also fun.
For the slight difference in price I would suggest getting a 1 gig card as it gives 5-10 percent better performance.
Agreed. This will future proof your purchase to some degree, as the 1G version will cope with higher res better. I have been using the 460 1G version for some time with a e6850 (3.00 overclocked to 3.600) with good results, but being a duel core, its holding the 460 back a bit. Am upgrading soon though...
As someone who had the same set up till last week I can safely say a q6600 even oc'ed to 3ghz bottlenecks a good clocked 1gig 460, when I got my 460 I was abit meh about it I came from a oc'ed 260 and didn't see a massive boost in fps in games like bfbc2, mafia 2, civ5, just cause2 ect I read many forums people saying I wouldn't see much difference from 260 to 460... but then I monitored my cpu and in most new games it was maxing out all 4 cores. Im now on a i5 760 and the difference is amazing its still only at 2.8 but i will oc it soon as it can still max out in bfbc2 and a few others. I don't think people realize how old (in tech terms) the core 2's are alot of things have changed in graphics card tech in the last few years why would you think cpu's haven't as well.
