[TC] Gaming Forums

I've been reading on the internet quite a bit, that an AMD AM3 processor chip on an AM2 (or AM2+) board causes a 5-15% bottleneck on everything, my chip is an AMD Athlon II X3 445 running at 3.1 GHz per core (three cores), on my ASUS M2N68-AM Plus (Micro-ATX) motherboard with 2 x 2 GB of DDR2 RAM at 800 MHz from PNY, my graphics card is an ASUS EN GTX560 (quite powerful, although something seems to hinder its performance). The BIOS on the Motherboard is the most recent as far as I've checked.


Is the bottleneck thing true? I have plans on getting DDR3 RAM and a full-size ATX board.

Think you'll find one way or another there will be a bottle neck on your machine unless you can find a set of parts that all work at the exact speed, of course some bottle-necks are better or worse than others so it's a case of making a good decision in terms of money-performance.

The difference between the AM2 and AM3 is only the DDR3 memory controller (which is built in the cpu). But from what I've seen, the differences are quite marginal, somewhat below 5%. Buying new memory + a new board is quite uneconomic, compared to the (hoped-for) performance gain.
I'd wait until its really necessary to buy something new, but then renew the CPU as well.