is this bottleneck bad

[bigjohnny]

i have been told that my cpu is a bottleneck and will bottleneck my gpu but i dont have the budget to upgrade my cpu maybe until next year and i have yet to buy a video card but i am going for the gigabyte r9 290 will my fps drop because of bottleneck if so how many will drop and what other ways can the bottleneck affect my performance

intel i3 4170 3.7ghz
antec eartwatts green ea650w 80+ bronze
seagate 1tb hard drive
kingston hyperx blue 1600 8gb
ga b85m ds3h a
win 7 ultimate sp1 64bit

 

[Dunlop0078]

It will bottleneck the severity will depend on the game, no way I can tell you exactly how many fps you will lose overall. A bottleneck could introduce stuttering and micro stuttering as well as low fps again completely depends on the game. In games that mainly rely on the gpu it should do fine, in games that are cpu heavy you may have to play with the settings to get them running smooth. Why are you looking at a 290? Is it used and going for a good price? Otherwise their are better choices, let me know your budget for a gpu if you want me to recommend something.

 

[bootcher]

In general in i5 would be a better choice for a R9 290, but the i3 will also perform pretty good. Only in games that rely heavily on multi-core CPU will you see a difference in performance. The difference is not so great, mainly because the i3 is a dual core but with hyper-threading making it perform as a quad-core.