Is there a way to tell if your CPU is bottlenecking your system?

Would my CPU (Q8400 @ stock speed) + 4GB DDR2 be bottlenecking my video card (HD6970)?

I'm contemplating upgrading to an i7 but obviously that would mean new mobo and RAM and i wouldn't be up for it unless there were some serious performance increases.

So is there a way to find out where the bottleneck is in my system?



Win7 Ultimate 64bit|||>There will be a typical 35% performance increase overall from an older Q processor like you have to any i7 core cpu. Baseline I am using is the i7 920...so you can expect maybe even 40% + with a higher i7, like a 950, for example.



One caution! The LGA 1366 socket is going to disappear here real fast, just as soon as Intel fixes the chipset problem for the P67 and H67 chipsets which already has been corrected, but full production of chipsets will not be underway until April...all the current Generation II i7' motherboards have been pulled from the market. I would wait for at least two months here until the corrected chipset gets installed on motherboards and get a Sandy Bridge cpu if I were you. The replacement socket will be the LGA 1155 socket for the Gen II Sandy Bridges...|||For an upgrade, you might want to consider a coricidin bottle. As stereotypical as that would be, you could do worse...|||PCWizard can do that kind of benchmarking, and it is free