I have a c2d e6300@2.9ghz on a MSI P965 Platinum motherboard. I recently bought 4gb ballistix ram and a xfx gtx 260 Black Edition which was a good jump from the ATI X1950Pro before.



You could say there is a slight bottleneck in my system and the graphics card is being held back. My question is which CPU shall I upgrade to? My price range is in the E8500/Q9300 range but wonder if such an upgrade would be beneficial & if dual or quad is the best bet - I will not be encoding or image processing.
I am not taking the i7 route now, as I can't justify the price.


Another question is if the P965 can supply the bandwidth from the CPU/RAM to the PCI x16 v1 slot that the GTX 260 is sitting in, though from what I have read it should not be a limiting factor and I will benefit more from the larger L2 Cache, smaller process, new Instructions (SSE blah blah) and ultimately the much higher clock frequencies of a new CPU.



FYI I am getting 12331 in 3dmark06, P13075 in Vantage and 4448 in Furmark.