i just bought an 8600GT (i only play WoW) and was wondering if there exists a bottleneck with my pentium D processor?
Not sure, maybe. Benchmarking your video card then overclock your CPU and benchmark again, if you see a drastic up in speed then yes. I think you might have a slight bottleneck, but im not entirely sure since I never had much experience with Pentium Ds.
Which Pentium D do you have? I had an 840EE -3.2GHz 2 Meg L2 HT 90nm- and later a 940 -3.2GHz 4 meg L2 -65nm- They werent BAD proc's for the time...just REALLY warm and essentially 2 single cores smashed together. Anyway... I also had an 8600GT, I got it to replace my "aging" 7600GT and thought it would be leaps and bounds better. It wasnt. I was blinded by the shiny new features DX 10 and shader model 4 etc. Long story short, it was basically a rebadged 7600GT like I had, with a few added extentions and such to support the DX10 etc. The memory bus, speed, gpu speed...everythin was the same spec wise. This means I was putting MORE load on a rebaged 7600gt that I was tying to improve upon....FAIL. I was MUCH happier with the GTS variant of the card. I had that card for some time, thru when 9000 series came out....which again...were largely rebadges of the 8800. I'm no ATi fanboi, pls dont think I'm green bashing....Aside from a brief stint with XFire 3870s before my current 4870, I was green team since they absorbed 3DFx. So then to exactly answer your question, No your proc wont bottleneck that card unless you have very slow RAM and a very low spec'd P4 D CPU, even then I dont think it would be significant. More likely, if your noticing any slow downs or stutters, Its that 7600GT you have in there masked as an 8600GT. Do you have the possibility of exchanging the card for a GTS variant? Zyro
