A8-5600K (OC'd) Bottleneck 270X?

[EricCan864]

I have a A8-5600K OC'd to 4.3GHz on a Hyper 212 EVO and I want to buy a R9 270X, and eventually another one for Crossfire later down the road.

(I have an Eyefinity setup, but I don't game too often on PC because my APU is holding me back)

Since you read the title, my question is, will the CPU bottleneck the GPU even with an OC? I am well aware that I shouldn't use an APU with dedicated graphics (I've had my PC for about a year without a GPU), and I'll probably end up upgrading to a Athlon II 760K anyway along with upgrading to a 270x.

Also, I'm not going to replace my motherboard for an AM3+ board or 1150 board, otherwise, I might as well just build a new PC.

I appreciate any responses, and thanks in advance.

 

[clutchc]

The 270X will right at the extreme end of the A10's ability to keep up with it. And there will be times the CPU bottlenecks the card. Dual 270x cards is a waste of money with an APU. As for the Athlon X4 760K, it will be more of a sideways upgrade than a real improvement: http://cpuboss.com/cpus/AMD-Athlon-X4-760K-vs-AMD-A8-5600K

 

[EricCan864]

***I also forgot to mention I usually only game on only one of my three monitors***


What if I got a R9 270 and OC'd it and paired that card with a 760K? Do you think it would still bottleneck?

I also found this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJrY74resY

Granted, this was with an 8120 and that has 8 threads/cores which will perform slightly better in some games, but the 760K has greater performance-per-core.

And to think about it more, that setup in the video was on Mantle, which BF4 performs better on, so the 8120 may not be that much better than the 760k, or maybe the 760k will loosen that threshold between the CPU and the r9 270(x) .

http://cpuboss.com/cpus/AMD-FX-8120-vs-AMD-Athlon-X4-760K
http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/91/AMD_Athlon_X4_760K_vs_AMD_FX-Series_FX-8120.html

And if that has dual r9 270's on an 8 core cpu, then maybe a 760k with dual r9 270's wouldn't be so bad.

 

[clutchc]

Yes, the 270 would be a more realistic choice. And only if you go for the 760K and OC it along with the card. The 760K isn't a bad little processor. I had one for awhile during my FM2 experimentation. Here is my 3DMark results with an HD 7870 OC card (both at stock): http://www.3dmark.com/fs/1196789
Crysis 3 single player could play at medium settings with no stutter @1080p. Since the 270 is basically the 7870, your results would be similar.
Playing multiplayer on a busy 64 player server would be much harder on the processor due to it having to maintain the data for for all the other players.

 

[EricCan864]

Alright, thanks.

Since my motherboard only supports PCI x16 2.0 and 270's mostly support 3.0, do you think that would affect the performance with the CPU and GPU?

 

[clutchc]

Not a bit. PCIe 3.0 was mainly intended for the new PCie SSD interface, since they are slightly bottlenecked by even SATA III today. No card I know of can saturate the x16 lanes of PCIe 2.0. In fact I doubt any could saturate even using x8 lanes at 2.0.