Will my Phenom II B55 X4 bottleneck the Radeon R9 270X?

gimmigzgy

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Oct 12, 2013
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First of all here is my system specs:

My desktop is running @ 1440x900 resolution

AMD Phenom II X2 555 (unlocked to B55 X4 @ 3.2GHz)
MSI 880GM-E43
4GB DDR3 Ram
Seasonic S 12 II 620w (bronze)
1TB WD Black 64mb cache
750gb Seagate Barracuda 7200
160gb WD (old harddisk)


I am currently using a Inno3D GT240 1GB DDR3 graphics card, and I am planning to upgrade to a Sapphire R9 270x. Here is the link for the item
http://www.sapphiretech.com/presentation/product/?cid=1&gid=3&sgid=1227&pid=2037&psn=&lid=1&leg=0

I want to know if my current system will bottleneck if I do purchase this card.
Thank you!
 
Solution
Short answer: No.

Long answer: Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

Excluding the obvious (mechanical hard drive is a bottleneck on everything), upgrading the RAM's capacity could probably help, depending on what you use the computer for. If you use it for, say, facebook (consistently uses > 1gb alone on my machine), and other browser pages that consume lots of memory that you like to leave open for more than 5 seconds at a time, your computer's probably doing a lot of writes to the disk as virtual memory. On the other hand, if it's exclusively a gaming machine, you probably don't have to worry about it much because I've noticed that it's relatively rare for a game to use 3+gb, especially on the settings your machine will...

Omegaclawe

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Sep 28, 2013
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Short answer: No.

Long answer: Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

Excluding the obvious (mechanical hard drive is a bottleneck on everything), upgrading the RAM's capacity could probably help, depending on what you use the computer for. If you use it for, say, facebook (consistently uses > 1gb alone on my machine), and other browser pages that consume lots of memory that you like to leave open for more than 5 seconds at a time, your computer's probably doing a lot of writes to the disk as virtual memory. On the other hand, if it's exclusively a gaming machine, you probably don't have to worry about it much because I've noticed that it's relatively rare for a game to use 3+gb, especially on the settings your machine will probably be able to handle.

That said, it's probably the next place to look at upgrading, regardless. Sure, with your current setup, that graphics card falls behind everything, but you should be able to run the new one without issue.

Basically the part that'd create the bottleneck would be the PCI-Express slot, and since that Motherboard runs at 2.0 and not even the Titan maxes out the bandwidth there, you should be good.
 
Solution

Omegaclawe

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Sep 28, 2013
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You don't need to upgrade the Hard Drive, per say, but if you get one, you'll be hard pressed to buy a computer without one in the future.

Also note that, as SSD size increases, so does performance. Not saying you should get a 1TB drive, but...

I'd do the RAM first, personally. Increase your SSD life anyway if you get one.
 
That card should be good for your system.

Don't think you need to add a SD if you are using the WD Black as your main drive.

Moving to over 4 gig of RAM is only useful if you have a 64 bit operating system. If your installation is 32bit going over 4 gig of RAM is a waste as Windows won't be able to use it.
 

gimmigzgy

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Oct 12, 2013
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I am currently using my WD Black as my main drive.
My OS is windows 8 64bit.

I am thinking to upgrade to an 8gb ram, but I am currently using a 2gb Kingston 1333 and a 2gb Apacer 1333.
The ram I want to buy is an CORSAIR XMS3 4GB 1333MHZ.

Is it okay if I use these 3 different rams at the same time?
If yes, how would the performance be?
 
@ gimmigzgy: Unless the monitor is smaller than 1920x1080 the 270 will be a good upgrade from the existing card and will run perfectly in the existing system. Just remember to fully uninstall the existing Nvidia drivers and software before installing the new card and its drivers/software.
The motherboard supports 4 memory slots, for maximum performance I suggest you either: add 4Gb as 2x2Gb sticks (giving a total of 8Gb as 4x2Gb sticks) or get 2x4Gb sticks to replace the existing pair.
It's hard to say if mixed memory will work perfectly, some motherboards can still be fussy about how you mix, but usually the it will simply set all the installed modules to the speed of the slowest so incompatibility issues are rare these days.
 

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