Bottleneck: CPU or GPU or RAM

Does anyone have any info on what point does either the CPU or the GPU or RAM slows you down. For example, with respect to RAM, I noted the Gamespot Oblivion Performance Guide indicated going from 1GB of RAM to 2GB didn't have much of an impact.

I just ordered a Dell 1710 with the GTX 7900 512MB and T2400 CPU and 1 MB of RAM. I would guess the CPU would be the weak spot in playing a game like Oblivion, but am curious to know if there is any resource out there to show, at least for gaming, how you should match CPUS/GPUS/and RAM.

Seems like there is a lot of potential to waste money (eg Dell offering 4MB RAM) by buying too much of one thing and not enough of another. Along that line, I am wondering if I should have spent the extra $200 for the T2500. It would be an extra $500 for a T2600!





Thanks.

 

Just to clear things up a bit. You got 1GB of RAM (1000 MB's). The Dell 1710 will run Oblivion great with everything on the highest settings. The Core Duo CPU that you got with your 1710 will not be the weak point! You have a killer machine and It won't have any problem running anything!! Some games when you upgrade from 1GB to 2GB's the FPS of the game increase by quite a lot. For example BF2 runs much better on 2GB's then 1GB. Other games you won't even see a difference.

 

1gb of ram is 1024MBs. RAM is kind of a bottleneck and this point, I would go ahead and get another gb of ram. Otherwise, the CPU and GPU are top of the line.

 

Advertised (base 10) GB are different from real (base 2) GB. A 100 GB HD may only have 93, for instance. However, I do believe a 1 GB RAM stick has 1024 MB.

I have heard the GPU is almost always the bottleneck.

 

Thanks, yes I meant to say 1GB of RAM, not 1 MB. RAM seemed to be the easiest to upgrade so was the thing I was the least worried about if I got it wrong. Just seems interesting that there is no real guidance on how to keep these things roughly balanced - kind of like having one buffed and one scrawny arm.

 

RAM. Especially in notebooks. Then GPU then CPU. Then disk. It depends on what you are doing. Some people prefer the other things first.

Cheers,

 

Regarding RAM: there are two things to consider, speed and amount. Speed obviously plays it's part. Size is also important and also easy to check. If you open up your task manager and the amount of RAM used is higher than 1024MB while playing Oblivion, you will benifit from more RAM. If not, upgrading to more RAM will bring you 0,0% performance increase unless you go from single to dual channel.

 

just to be curious, are all the internal hardware accessories can be upgraded inside a laptop, regardless of its difficulty? I mean, of course RAM is the easiest, but how about others like hard disk, or sound or graphics cards?

 

only the RAM, Hard Drive and some times the CPU is really upgradeable, some times you can change your video card, but it's very uncomon.

 

to add to what Zak said, you can also buy an aftermarket sound card.