How much of a bottleneck will the AMD FX-6300 be if I upgrade?

Nathan_

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Feb 13, 2016
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Hey,
it might sound like a stupid question with a obvious answer but right now I want to upgrade my GPU from an AMD R7 360 to an AMD R9 290x. My CPU is the FX-6300 6-core processor as mentioned before and I have 8Gb dual channel RAM. I know, it will probably be a bottleneck, but let me make a different question that is a bit less dumb:

Will I see a big difference if I upgrade from a R7 360 to a R9 290x and still keep the same FX 6300?

The best games I'm aiming to play with it are Battlefront and Battlefield 4. On low graphics, these have been running decent on 60 fps (SWBF) and 100 fps (BF4).
Thanks for your attention!
 
Solution
You'll definitely have a CPU bottleneck, but you'd still see a big performance boost over an R7 360, so it would still be a worthwhile upgrade. Be aware that the R9 290x is extremely power hungry, and runs extremely hot, especially if the card you're looking at is using the reference cooler. You're going to want to have really good case airflow and a high quality power supply to run it.
You'll definitely have a CPU bottleneck, but you'd still see a big performance boost over an R7 360, so it would still be a worthwhile upgrade. Be aware that the R9 290x is extremely power hungry, and runs extremely hot, especially if the card you're looking at is using the reference cooler. You're going to want to have really good case airflow and a high quality power supply to run it.
 
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Nathan_

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Feb 13, 2016
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Thanks for the reply! I was aware of the GPU's power efficiency so I'm already looking extensively into a solid PSU. The company I bought my PC from already put in a good case airflow that was at least better than my previous one so I do think that that is good as how it is right now.
Btw, if I would run a R9 290x on an Intel i7 4790k, how good would my system then perform in percentages in terms of frames per second compared to the i7 (in games like BF4)? Can you answer that?
 
There is an old CPU benchmark for BF4 here that used an R9 290x, and it would indicate virtually no difference between the two. Do keep in mind that is a single player benchmark, and single player Battlefield is very well known to be light on the CPU and be entirely GPU bound, with large multiplayer maps being far more CPU heavy. It's really difficult to benchmark multiplayer so it would be hard to say what the difference would be. Since you're looking at a somewhat older AMD card, you do have the option of using Mantle in that game, which might help if you do run into CPU bottlenecking while running the game in DirectX 11 mode.