Gaming PC Build Help?

CynicalSKUD

Honorable
Oct 23, 2013
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Hello, I have a question on what to do. I currently have an Amd motherboard a NVIDIA GeForce GT 630 graphics card and an AMD FX(tm)-4100 Quad Core. I want to make an upgrade, mainly to improve my Arma/Arma 2/ Arma 3 gaming experience.

1.) I can change my motherboard to an ASRockZ77 Extreme 4m, and change my processor to Intel i7-2600k, but I would still have my NVIDIA GeForce GT 630 graphics card.

2.) Or I can get an AMD Radeon HD 7870 and keep my original setup.

Which should I choose to improve my game play experience, mainly the Arma games? Also if you say my computer might bottleneck please fully explain the term "Bottleneck" for I am still not fully into computer builds.
 
Solution
The 7870 will be a much better improvement. The GT 630 is a pretty horrible gpu. Your cpu might bottleneck some, (cpu not keeping up with the GPU), but your FX 4100 with a HD 7870 is far superior to an i7 with a GT 630.

MD1987

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Sep 29, 2013
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Also, to explain "Bottleneck." It would be the component(s) in your system that are the slowest, causing other parts to slow down/idle/underperform because said bottleneck part is too slow to keep up.

Perfect example above. Powerful i7 processor and a slow Geforce 630. The processor would probably die of boredom waiting on the GPU.
 
yeah... between those two options i'd get a new gpu... the cpu isn't great but it's no where near the bottleneck that gpu is. just know that ARMA is a stupidly bad coded game that uses like 1 thread. so single core speed really matters with it. if at all possible you'll want to upgrade that cpu (and/or overclock it)