Does AMD A6 3620 Bottleneck a GIGABYTE 6970 2GB

I would say yes, that would be the limiting factor. The appeal of that line of CPUs is for the integrated graphics, which is worthless with a 6970.

It might be worth investing in a new motherboard and CPU if you want better performance. The FM1 socket doesn't have much wiggle room.

Overclocking might be worth a shot, but I don't think it will prove useful enough to eliminate the CPU as the bottleneck.

Yeah i overclocked it and i did notice a small increase in FPS but not much with both the 6970 OCed to 930 on the core and 1450 on the memory and with the CPU staying steady around 4.2 it was good for about 2 to 3 frames a sec increase on average using Hitman Absolutions benchmark on ultra...now would i see a deffinite increase with a fx 8350 on the gigagbyte 990FX motherboard or nothing substantial

Now is this a seriouse bottleneck or eh i lose a frame here and there? Would an upgrade really make a noticable difference? Also I ask about the FX 8350 with the Gigabyte 990FX because I can get both for about 250

Yes it's a pretty serious bottleneck. The A6 was not intended to be paired with mid-range discrete GPU's like the 6970.

The fx-8350 would be great and future proof because of it's 8 cores.

Well, the 8350 would be decent, but there is really no such thing as future proof. By the time most applications can utilize multiple threads, stock speeds and architectures will blow the 8350 out of the water.

Nonetheless, the 8350 should do the trick. It isn't quite as good as Intel's sandy / ivy i5s, but it is good enough for moderately taxing games. CPU intensive games like StarCraft 2 would still be better off with an Intel option, but it will be more than playable on the 8350.

You can't pair your GPU with that APU. The APU will run the weak integrated GPU with the strong one, which will give a MASSIVE bottleneck. You would be better off getting an Ivy-bridge CPU or if you're against Intel, you could get a decent vishera CPU from AMD, which won't perform as well as an Ivy-bridge.

No... He can just disable the built in APU and run it as pure CPU.

The problem is that the cpu is weak, too anemic to properly run the separate GPU he has.


He needs to overclock that sucker, until an upgrade can be had.

Correct.

Yeah I played around with Dual Graphics originally when I had a 6670 but it never seemed to work as well as when I just ran the 6670 by itself...thats why I stepped up to a 6970 I picked up but then I started reading up on how a cpu can bottleneck a gpu and didnt know how much of an impact it really had. Anyway I was looking around and did find the 8350FX and that Gigabyte 990fx motherboard for 259 and thought well if its a bad enough bottleneck I could spare the extra money and upgrade.

Sounds kinda weird. But just stupid of me not seeing that.

I even turned off the integrated GPU on my laptop, foolish of me not seeing that. Anyways, thanks for correcting me, I would never try to mislead anyone on these forums.  

Best answer selected by immortalpenguin9.