If I use a Radeon HD 6870 (2gb GDDR5) with my Athlon II dual core 3.2ghz processor and 4gb of DDR3 1333mhz RAM, how badly will I be bottlenecking the video card? This is a temporary hardware setup until I have enough money to upgrade my machine to Ivy Bridge i7, probably around the end of the year to take advantage of Christmas salesSince this is temporary, I don't really mind bottleneckingOn another note, how well will this bottlenecked GPU perform compared to my old Radeon 5450 (1gb DDR3)?
No doubt you are bottlenecking with that processor for sureYou should see a big difference between a 6870 and a 5450 GDDR5 is so much better than DDR3 for video cardsYou should be able to reach those very high graphic setting once you get that Ivy bridge I7 don't go cheap on ram and the motherboard though so many people do that they get a $500 processor and a $100 motherboard when you would be much better off getting a i5 and a higher end $250-350 motherboardAs far as ram goes you don't have to go all out but make sure you get something goodAlso I wanted to add that you will not see a difference between a 2gb GDDR5 and a 1gb unless you are playing on multiple monitors or a giant tvSo if you could get something with more stream processors for the same amount of money but only 1gb of ram I would go for that with a single monitor setup.
