Would a GTX 660 Ti be bottlenecked by this system?

[professormoobsicle]

Would a GTX 660 Ti be bottlenecked by this system?

ASRock 870 Extreme 3
AMD Phenom II X4 955
8 GB RAM DDR3 1333
MSI Twin Frozr II GTX 560 Ti (Which I want to replace)
8 GB DDR3 RAM
650 watt power supply

 

[fastreaction]

A little. I don't think there is a significant bottleneck going on here imo.

- Fastreaction

 

[selayan]

I have that processor on the work pc, just don't run windows xp it shoudln't be that bad lol

 

[ncasolo]

Would a GTX 660 Ti be bottlenecked by this system?

ASRock 870 Extreme 3
AMD Phenom II X4 955
8 GB RAM DDR3 1333
GTX 560 Ti (Which I want to replace)
8 GB DDR3 RAM

You're going to get a lot of different opinions on this. I'm going to say absolutely yes. My 5870 1GB card is somewhat bottlenecked by that same CPU and mine is overclocked to 3.5Ghz. You can put a 660Ti in it, but your performance gains won't be as good as they could be. For $300 you're not going to see a significant upgrade.

Personally I'd recommend saving until you can upgrade to an i5 CPU along with a GPU upgrade.

For reference my current PC

AMD Penom II X4 955 BE @ 3.5Ghz
8GB DDR3-1333 RAM
Sapphire 1GB 5870

Some of it will depend on the game/settings. I know iRacing, which is what I primarily play, demands a good deal of CPU performance. Maybe you can find some gaming benchmarks for CPUs to determine how they affect FPS and go from there.

 

[gamerkila57]

no it want bottleneck you'll be fine ? just oc it o like 4GHz

 

[professormoobsicle]

Best answer selected by professormoobsicle.

 

[ncasolo]

Would a GTX 660 Ti be bottlenecked by this system?

ASRock 870 Extreme 3
AMD Phenom II X4 955
8 GB RAM DDR3 1333
MSI Twin Frozr II GTX 560 Ti (Which I want to replace)
8 GB DDR3 RAM
650 watt power supply

For the record I just upgraded. Well I didn't upgrade I actually built a brand new system. I spent $1000. The highlights are

ASRock Z77 Extreme4 Motherboard
Intel i5 3570K CPU
HIS IceQ Turbo 7950

I find when the motherboard and CPU need to be upgraded to make a GPU upgrade worthwhile that it seems like a new PC is a good idea at that point.

 

[Guest]

Would a GTX 660 Ti be bottlenecked by this system?

ASRock 870 Extreme 3
AMD Phenom II X4 955
8 GB RAM DDR3 1333
MSI Twin Frozr II GTX 560 Ti (Which I want to replace)
8 GB DDR3 RAM
650 watt power supply

Okay, what do people mean by the term "bottlenecked?"

I'm looking at your setup, and I see that you want to swap out your GTX-560Ti for a GTX-660Ti, and all I'm thinking is "yeah, go do it!" but what do people mean when they ask if this "part" will be bottlenecked by their system?

 

[ncasolo]

Okay, what do people mean by the term "bottlenecked?"

I'm looking at your setup, and I see that you want to swap out your GTX-560Ti for a GTX-660Ti, and all I'm thinking is "yeah, go do it!" but what do people mean when they ask if this "part" will be bottlenecked by their system?

Let's pretend he's getting 20FPS right now in BF3. If he upgrades to a 660 Ti he might get 22fps or 23fps because his CPU isn't powerful enough. You could put the most badass GPU in an old PentiumII PC and you're not going to get 60fps.

The question he's asking is will I be able to use the 660Ti to its full potential or will I only use about 70% of what it is capable of because my CPU can't do any better. FPS isn't just about what graphics card you have. Everything plays a part in that to a certain degree and on certain games it plays a bigger or lesser part. It really depends on the game.

 

[ncasolo]

...

I ran a 7970 (more powerful than a 660ti) on a Phenom II x6 (granted, overclocked) at 1080p and experienced almost no bottlenecking...

His CPU is NOT a reason to avoid upgrading to a 660ti, unless he is gaming below 1080p resolution.

x6 overclocked and a 955 (Not BE?) are not the same chip. That's at least 1 maybe 2 tiers on Tom's chart.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-cpu-review-overclock,3106-5.html

1 tier and if you add the overclock then 2 tiers.

 

[ncasolo]

I thought the 955 was a BE?

If not, then yeah you might be in trouble in some games. If so, then you're fine.

The x6 only has an advantage over the x4 in BF3 multiplayer (the only game I'm aware of that will use more than 4 cores). Other than that, it's all about clock speed. If he has a BE chip, he can clock it to 3.7-3.8 easily on just the stock voltage and cooler, and then he's fine.

Guru3d took a look at this recently and basically concluded that while there are obvious advantages to the Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge i5's and i7's, the old Phenom II CPUs are fine for 1080p:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon-hd-7970-cpu-scaling-performance-review/10

Fair points, but I would again say it is still specific to the game(s) in question to a certain degree. The sim/game I referrenced is a racing simulator and the performance difference between a 965 BE overclocked and a first generation i5 chip overclocked were measurable (more than 10%). Ok ok that's just CPUs.

When you start swapping GPUs (1GB 5870 vs. 2GB 5970) there was a negligible performance increase in the different GPUs. I wish I still had the threads with all the benchmarks, but the small company that did all the benchmarks went belly up and disappeared.

Like I said in my first post people aren't going to agree on this for sure. It really is going to depend a little bit on the game(s) in question.

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey