Building new machine, bottlenecks

[pit5000]

I'm planning on building a new gaming machine over the next few months. I plan to wait for the new Haswell chips later this summer and a GTX 680. I was thinking about getting the GTX 680 now and using it with my old Core 2 Duo @ 3 ghz (i forgot the model number) from many years ago until the haswell parts come out. Would the CPU bottleneck be so bad with such an old part that I won't notice much difference from my current ATI 4830 GPU? Or will it be enough to see a noticeable difference? How much of an improvement would there be if there is any? I only have 4 GB of DDR2 800 on an ASUS P5Q board. Should I just wait?

[iTonyy]

Yes you are likely to run into bottlenecks not only with your CPU but also your motherboard which only has pcie 2.0

There will be an improvement in performance but how much is hard to say and this will depend on your current situation

What I mean is that if you were already running a game at 30fps, the 680 should boost you into the 40fps granted textures and antiailsing are set moderately so you won't run into a CPU bottleneck. From 30 to 40 will be a noticeable difference but if you were alreadying running that game at 50fps then upping that to 60 won't be a whole lot of difference (also keep in mind if you want to do a smooth 60+ fps, meaning vsync, you'll also need a monitor capable of such refresh speeds)

[hiyayhi]

You will see a fair increase of performance, but yes there will be a massive bottleneck.

One thing to note is that we may not even see all that much of a performance improvement from Haswell as there is next to no competition from AMD to make intel sh@# themselves and start producing amazing chips. All that some intel employees have said is that haswell should be an "overclockers dream", this statement may not even be true though.