GTS 450 is to much for my 3.00 ghz cpu.

The GTS 450 say a min 3.2 ghz cpu and I do not have that, I am running this card now and it is running my cpu to 100 % (e6850 3.00 ghz intel ). MB is Intel dg33tl with xp. I had a gtx 8800 but it was over heating so I bought a gts 450 and I just have a few days left to return it. What good video card could I get that would run in my MB with my CPU..? My old gtx 8800 was good when it was new but it always ran to hot now it's really gone. Thank you for any info.

there should be no problem pairing a GTS 450 with an e6850, the processor speed is not a requirement. You can (and I have) run cards like this with any system that has a PCI Express x16 slot, which includes the Via C7 or Nano, Intel's Atom, old Athlon 64s, and so on. You want a decent chip because otherwise you will have a bottleneck, meaning while you are playing your games, the video card has to sit and wait for the processor to feed it data. So the video card will render the scene, toss it out to the monitor, and then have to sit for the CPU to feed it more data to render. But the higher the resolution you run, the less of a bottleneck the cpu will be, because the video card has to work harder at higher resolutions.

By installing a new video card, your CPU usage should not jump to 100%, in fact it should hardly change at all. Were you sure to remove the drivers you used with the 8800 GTX and download the latest drivers from the Nvidia website for the GTS 450?

Thank you for the reply Stang, yes I installed 260.63 drivers and did uninstalled the old drivers first then check to see if there where any left behind then restarted xp and installed the 260.63 drivers, I did not use the cd disk that came with the gts 450 I just installed the 260.63 drivers I had downloaded first from nvidia and put them into My Documents. Then I shut down, turn the power off, unpluged and turned on the start button to make sure there was no power left then installed the gts 450.