Skyrim performance bottleneck help

[Masteroderus]

Hello, I just recently helped a friend upgrade their video card to a 2 gig 6950 for the purposes of skyrim/diablo2/bf3. I was over tweaking it out and i found that the frame rate was really really low in open areas only. Could this be due to a cpu bottleneck? They are using an old x2 250 and I was wondering if upgrading to a quad core 9xx would potentially eliminate the bottleneck.

Other system data:

8 gig low latency memory
wd caviar black hdd
ax850 psu

Thank you for your time.

[Shadowmeph]

by quad core you are meaning staying with a AMD quad core? anyways I would think that any 955 and up Quad would be good enough and allot better then the x2 250 for gaming also make sure that you have good airflow to keep the card as cool as possible I read somewhere that the FPS drops when these cards heat, I am not sure if that i s true of not but make sure the fan kicks in when the card starts to get fairly warm lol

[Masteroderus]

Thanks!

[ipaine]

Yes Skyrim is very limited by the CPU. The problem is that all of the shadows are done with your cpu and not the gpu like it should be.

[Masteroderus]

Aha! So turning down the shadows means maxxed settings with good min fps on a bad bad x2! Thanks!