CPU bottleneck question

Lee Turner · Sep 23, 2014

im planing to buy a new graphics card around christmas time to replace my powercolor 6870.
I was wondering if my CPU would be able to cope with it and not bottleneck the graphics card, i have a Intel I5 2500k 3.3ghz.

Thanks

IInuyasha74 · Sep 23, 2014

You shouldn't have an issue. If you go for a really high one, like a GTX 980 then you should overclock, but in general you will be okay.

RookieOfTheYear · Sep 23, 2014

Yea, that CPU is still very powerful. Like IInuyasha said, unless you are going with the highest cards you should be just fine. I have heard that CPU overclocks very well. So it might be fun to get a CPU cooler and try messing around with some overclocking.

How much were you thinking of spending on the GPU?

IInuyasha74 · Sep 23, 2014

RookieOfTheYear :

Yes indeed they do. Intel's Sandy Bridge and following CPUs overclock amazingly. Sandy Bridge does better because they typically have lower clock speeds starting out, and they all tend to max out around the same level since the architecture has stayed very similar through the last several upgrades. Getting to 4Ghz on an i5-2500k with a Coolermaster cooler shouldn't take much effort at all really, and that would net you 20% increase in performance. The limit tends to be 4.2Ghz-5Ghz so there is more room on top of that too, just it becomes steadily more difficult after that point.

RobCrezz · Sep 23, 2014

Yeah the 2500k is good enough for any card on the market. You should overclock if you can though, they overclock very very well with a good cooler.

Lee Turner · Sep 23, 2014

Sweet thanks guys i got a pretty decent cooler on it already an enermax ets t40, im probably either looking to get a gtx 770 or a R9 280x, il need to upgrade my psu as well only got a 450w one at the moment :3

IInuyasha74 · Sep 23, 2014

At this point, though I favor AMD, I would say you are probably best not to get a GTX 770 or an R9 280x. If you can find the R9 280x really cheap, maybe, but if not the newly released Nvidia GTX 970 simply has too good of performance for the price. While most R9 280x cards cost less, the cheapest GTX 970 is cheaper than the 7 most expensive R9 280x cards, while providing a lower power consumption and much better perfromance.

https://pcpartpicker.com/parts/video-card/#c=186,148&sort=a8

you will still need to upgrade your PSU, but really this is now the best GPU for the money on the market.

Lee Turner · Sep 23, 2014

thanks man appreciate your advice

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