Is my 7870 being bottle necked by my cpu

[Sarutobi0997]

im planning on building : http://pcpartpicker.com/p/xG0T and i dont know if an i3-3220 would pair well with the 7870 i have so im wondering if i can use the i3 or do i need an i5 to get good performance. I want to play games like Crysis 2, BF3, Planetside 2, TF2, etc. at which ever settings give the best visuals : performance ratio. im not planning on doing any huge gpu intensive tasks but i might try to upload videos to youtube but nothing like sony vegas.

 

[Sarutobi0997]

it shouldnt bottleneck.. but is highly recommended to get i5-3750k for some of those high end games you want to play

im trying my best to keep this as low as possible; i dont want to spend more than 750 USD

 

[iam2thecrowe]

nvidia cards favor the titles you show there, the gtx660 is slightly cheaper than 7870 normally, and performs just as well overall, better in bf3. if you are in to overclocking i would suggest getting the amd fx6300, it performs pretty much on par with the i3 in games, better in some, slower in others, but when overclocked would surpass it.

 

[Sarutobi0997]

nvidia cards favor the titles you show there, the gtx660 is slightly cheaper than 7870 normally, and performs just as well overall, better in bf3. if you are in to overclocking i would suggest getting the amd fx6300, it performs pretty much on par with the i3 in games, better in some, slower in others, but when overclocked would surpass it.

so i see that the nvidia cards are about 5USD cheaper on pcpartpicker but is the performance that much different. teh amd card i have listed is a ghz ed. which means its clocked at 1+ghz and can be over clocked up to about 7950 stock speed. how does oc-ing work with the GTX660?

 

[iam2thecrowe]

you can get factory oc'd gtx660's, i have tinkered with mine a bit, but i would say it isnt as easy to overclock, although i haven't read much about 7870 oc'ing. I had to mess around a bit with BIOS mod to OC mine to where i want it. It is a bit limited since you cant change voltage without BIOS mod.

 

[Sarutobi0997]

you can get factory oc'd gtx660's, i have tinkered with mine a bit, but i would say it isnt as easy to overclock, although i haven't read much about 7870 oc'ing. I had to mess around a bit with BIOS mod to OC mine to where i want it. It is a bit limited since you cant change voltage without BIOS mod.

so do you highly recommend gtx 660 over the 7870? idk if it will work well with my processor (i3-3220). also i read the 660 has 192-bit memory bus while 7870 has 256-bit memory bus (i dont know if that makes a difference)

 

[goldsauce]

It will work fine with a i3 3220, I have one and it runs fine and it actually beats all 1st gen i5's, I have a 7850 but I have had my brothers 7970 in my system and it did get bottlenecked a bit but not by too much but I mean a 7970 is light years ahead of a 7870 so you should be fine and games like Battlefield 3 and Far Cry 3 run smooth as butter on the i3 3220.

 

[Sarutobi0997]

Best answer selected by sarutobi0997.

 

[cumi2k4]

get a low end i5 such as i5 2300...i think the price diff is about $30 - $40?
i3 is enough for gaming, but i'd like the additional core for background tasks.

 

[bigbasedrum]

I was going to display what exactly the bus size differences do, but then I got confused! So, I'd rather just explain the effect it has on performance. Effectively, the 256-bit bus can transfer more data faster. So when the card starts working with data that is very large but not as graphically intense you see a drop in frame rates on the smaller bus as it can't transfer the data fast enough. In practice this happens when you start to apply large amounts of AA. So if you apply AA levels above x4 you will see the Nvidia card start to struggle, whereas the AMD card will be largely unaffected. I don't really know much about the Nvidia card, but I do have AMD card and I am very satisfied! At 1080p I can play most games on Ultra and x8 AA and all the bells and whistles. The few exceptions are Crysis 2 which sometimes drops a few frames but really not very often ( by drop I mean it goes below 35 FPS and that's with DX 11 and High-Res packs). The other exception is Metro 2033, but as we know that is a very demanding game (some say it's a bug), but even then just went from Ultra to High and then it works beautifully!

As far as the processor goes, I'm sure it would be adequate and you could always upgrade to an i5 later.

 

[bigbasedrum]

ugh! not display explain. Sorry