In this paper, downlink performance of multicarrier CDMA (MC-CDMA) systems under correlated fading channels is analytically investigated. Under code hopping, a signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) and bit error rate (BER) performance are derived in multi-cell environments. In addition, specific conditions to validate the commonly used Gaussian approximation of an interference plus noise distribution in MC-CDMA systems are discussed. It is proved that the approximation is adequate in case of low correlation between subcarriers and a large spreading factor (SF). The proposition is confirmed through comparison between analytical and simulation results.