Okay I just ordered a GT 240 from Newegg, and I'm pretty exited to get it, but what I wonder is if my cpu is gonna bottleneck my performance hard. I'm gonna build my new pc but I'm just gonna get the vid card first. Anyways onto the topic, I have a 1 core amd cpu which is pretty bad but yeah, do you think I will lose a whole bunch of performance?|||Yes, you will definitely bottleneck at the CPU, being single core, but save up for an AM3+ motherboard! They will be out soon and will run both current AM3 CPU's and the new Bulldozer core CPU's for when the price drops.|||before you go all wild man here, look at the $400 box from the September System Builder marathon that Tom's Hardware Guide conducted. that box has no operating system or externals, but they do go to some lengths to balance the gpu and cpu capabilities.
The HD 5670 they used in that box is about a 10% better performer than a GT 240 [equipped with 1 Gb GRRD5 memory, not GDDR3].
Tom's used an Athalon II x3 cpu with that box -- not exactly a world-beater.
AND, Tom's has relative performance charts for graphics cards shoud you decide you can go a bit better.
btw, I saw a GT 250 on sale last week for only $75 US. Might have been at Newegg.com -- t hat one will probably out do the HD 5670.
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the more complex games, graphics wise, won't run too well on the 240. See what Tom's had to say about them and remember that they used a multi-core [cpu] machine in their testing.
with a multi-core, the 2nd core is frequently tasked to help out the gpu [when the gpu is overloaded]. with a single core, when the gpu is overloaded, the cpu has to stop processing the game to lend a hand -- this causes jerkiness in the scenes.|||Not knowing your full system specs it's hard to say whether or not your cpu will bottleneck your performance until you build a new comp. You could have a 2.0GHz sempron (which would be a bottleneck) or a 3.5GHz Athlon64 which isn't horrible. I'd be suprised if you had a really slow single core cpu with a motherboard that has a PCIe 2.0 expansion slot for the new video card you ordered.|||Yes you will loose performance with that CPU.
The GT 240 is not a great card by the way.|||The likelihood of your processor of being a bottleneck is very high. An athlon 64 can barely decode a 1080p video encoded in h264, which is approximate baseline required performance to do anything useful these days. I have an Athlon 64 + Radeon HD3650 + 512 MB of ram, and it can't do much...
On the bright side, the GT240 SHOULD have all of nVidia's CUDA, Purevideo and other branded technology. You should be able to use DXVA (Direct X Video Acceleration) or VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation API for UNIX) which allows you to off load video decoding to the graphics card. If your going to build a new computer, consider turning your old PC into an HTPC! It won't be a gaming monster, but it should be an HD video beast!
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