Its hard to really tell, while you do have a older CPU. It should be enough so that bottlenecking won't be much of an issue if any issue at all. When it comes to bottle necking of the GPU, its only really the CPU that has an effect on this, unless you have AGP, PCI, PCIx4 instead of PCI-E, but the effects should still be minimal as the full pipeline of PCI-E has yet to be used to its full potential. While i can't tell you for sure to what extent the CPU may bottleneck it, you may be interested in the series of reviews that tomshardware is currently publishing on the internet. Here is the first of the series.
http://www.tomshardw...tform-analysis/while the article does review AGP cards, if you have PCI-E it'll still give you a generall idea of what to expect. Currently however, from what i have seen bottlenecking isn't that extreme. Unless you had a full GHz(or more) less then what you say you currently have. In the end, you should be fine, but I or anyone else for that matter could never really tell you to what extent you may or may not experience with bottlenecking. Also the future reviews in that series at tomshardware should be more benchmarks with the same GPU and different CPU's, it is there we will really see whether this is a larger or lesser issue from what we originally thought. Because at the moment, it's more or less speculation, there is little evidence to back it up. It does however make alot of sense of why this would happen.
James
Edited by james_8970, 10 January 2007 - 04:28 PM.