Hi, as it says on my profile im still running the old 9800gtx+ and now I'm really feeling the lag and performance loss in games and applications. Since its an old cpu, which would be the best graphics card that wouldnt cause bottleneck too much. I had my eyes set on getting a 650ti for now until I can upgrade at the end of the year for around £130 running at 1080 res. Thanks
I would say 660/7870 tops. Overclocking that cpu would help a great deal if you haven't already. 450x8 would be great but if your cooling kinda sucks you could probably do 400x8 very easily on stock volts (just guessing here). Good luck!
doh. posted this same question 5 months ago, guess I'm in the same situation. . is it the 660 or 660ti?? my cpu is stock clocked atm.
You can get a HD 7850 dirty cheap right now, it will be huge upgrade. GTX660 non or ti are little bit pricy... Anyway you will be hold back by that c2q, just do some overclocking...
the reason why I wouldnt get ati is because i use cs6 with Mercury playback so nvidia tend to work better on that 660ti is around £230, £100 more than 650ti
Depends by which games., most will be gpu bound at that resolution. I would go for at least 570GTX/660ti or AMD 7870/7950. OverClock that cpu and you can put in 7970 too, I know one friend with 7970 + q9450 @ 3.2ghz and he doesnt have any more bottleneck then me with a OC'ed 570GTX. Actually i have a little better fps in BF3 by cpu bound locations because of 400mhz higher OC.
^What he said....no reason not to get a high end card it'll still be faster than what you have now even with bottleneck. At least you won't need to upgrade again with a new CPU.
I found even with a 5770 my old C2Q6600 was most likely bottlenecked and I was overclocked @ 3.4Ghz, I would think about a upgrade in another area before getting a better card, I also had my 560ti on C2Q and going to sandybridge I saw a huge boost in performance.
honestly, it really depends on the game, some are more cpu bound than others, I agree completey with pill monster, get the highest model you can afford if your gaming. The bottleneck should be the least of your concerns really, having more GPU horsepower is always better, even with a bottleneck. besides you have a Q9450 which really performs well (still) in almost all games, especially when overclocked. Good Luck P.S. you should OC that cpu if you haven't already, get a CoolerMaster 212+ cpu cooler (amazing cooling ability and cheap too) and bring that thing up to 3.6Ghz (almost all Q9450's will OC to this speed and remain stable, with the right settings of course
