Maximum PC

I have a roughly 3 year old Phenom II X2 545 3.00 GHz dual core processor. I'm thinking about upgrading my video card to a 560 Ti.

Would the processor bottleneck the 560 Ti, and if so, how much?

Welcome to the forum!

Anyhow, immediate answer: yes your processor will be a huge bottleneck for the 560 Ti or any modern video card for almost all games. The only thing that won't be affected is GPU only applications and programs that is specially coded to work independent from the CPU (like folding).


Anyhow, I did some quick performance tests between my two main computers using a slew of gtx 570's.

Older Rig:

• Intel e6600 @ stock 2.4ghz
• 2GB Corsair Dual Channel DDR2
• MSI GTX 570 (main)
• EVGA 8800 GTS 640 (disabled)
• OCZ 700w PSU
• Windows XP Pro 32bit

Newer Rig:

• Intel i7 930 @ stock 2.8ghz (3.0ghz speed stepped)
• 6GB G.Skill Triple Channel cas7 DDR3
• MSI GTX 570 (main)
• MSI GTX 570 (disabled)
• OCZ 850w PSU
• Windows 7 Pro 64bit

Here are the results:

e6600; GTX570; CPU PhysX (8800 disabled)

i7 930; GTX570; CPU PhysX (2nd 570 disabled)


My e6600 machine is a bit slower than your x2 545 cpu, although I could do a slight overclock to around 2.6-2.8Ghz that will match the performance of your system, but even then, the results speak for themselves. I used the older 3dmark 2006 benchmarking app since my old system still uses XP and the newer 2011 version won't run on it, so it's hard to really tell how well the performance difference will be with more updated models and modern games with just this test. I could run more benchmarks, but honestly, in every game I've played on both systems, the results are about the same in terms of performance difference.

In most gpu focused benchmarks, its a staggering 64.93% increase and a total of 91.71% difference when going from the e6600 to the i7 930. Also to note with 3dmark 06, it didn't really stress the 570 that much; even on the i7 machine. Probably around 30% gpu usage when i was checking MSI afterburner.