Question CPU Bottleneck?

[Infikiran]

I built a couple of PCs for a friend of mine and his dad nearly 10 years ago. He purchased a couple of AMD RX Vega 64 cards to upgrade both PCs. There are a bit dated so I was curious of how bad this card will be bottlenecked and wonder how much of a difference this upgrade will make considering their current system specs:

1st PC:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad q9550
RAM: 8GB DDR2 1066Mhz
Current Graphics: Radeon 7970 3gb (Upgraded 4 years ago)

2nd PC
CPU: Intel Core i7 920
RAM: 12GB DDR3 1333MHz
Video Card: Radeon 4890 (Never upgraded)

There obviously will be a bump in performance but I know that some games will struggle with those CPUs nowadays and of course both PCs are still on PCI Express 2.0 slots.

How bad is the bottleneck on here? Both game in 1080p

 

[henry.j.kautz]

You're already bottlenecking the 7970 you have in the first system.
The second computer can barely handle a GTX 1060.
Keep the cards and build a new PC around them, or send them back. Those cards will be so bottlenecked in those systems it's not even worth trying to OC to catch up.

 

[hftvhftv]

A Vega 64 will be held back a lot by those systems, he'll be wasting his money by placing a brand new GPU into a 10 year old computer.

 

[Infikiran]

You're already bottlenecking the 7970 you have in the first system.
The second computer can barely handle a GTX 1060.
Keep the cards and build a new PC around them, or send them back. Those cards will be so bottlenecked in those systems it's not even worth trying to OC to catch up.

The PCs will end up being upgraded eventually so I think he will keep the cards for new builds later but didn't have the budget to do the whole thing at once. Are we talking about a drop in 30% performance or more?

 

[henry.j.kautz]

The PCs will end up being upgraded eventually so I think he will keep the cards for new builds later but didn't have the budget to do the whole thing at once. Are we talking about a drop in 30% performance or more?

At least. The Quad PC would be bottlenecked up to a factor of five times.

 

[boju]

Be mindful, that's if they run. There's more 'miss rather than hit cases' with amd cards on legacy boards than there are Nvidia. Won't know until you try.

 

[sizzling]

Look at it this way. Both of those systems are well below the minimum recommended to run modern AAA games. A Vega 64 can run 1080p/1440p 144Hz on any game. There is a huge imbalance.

Also if the power supplies are as old as the rest of the system there is no way I’d risk a new power hungry gpu on them. PSU components deteriorate with time and usage and when they fail can damage anything they are connected too.

 

[-Fran-]

Look at it this way. Both of those systems are well below the minimum recommended to run modern AAA games. A Vega 64 can run 1080p/1440p 144Hz on any game. There is a huge imbalance.

Also if the power supplies are as old as the rest of the system there is no way I’d risk a new power hungry gpu on them. PSU components deteriorate with time and usage and when they fail can damage anything they are connected too.

This.

More than the bottleneck you may get, I'd be more worried about the cards actually working on those Motherboards AND the PSUs actually being capable of feeding the very power hungry Vega64. I know, because I have one. It's a little oven. Good thing I live in the UK, so I use the central heating less! haha.

Cheers!

 

[Infikiran]

I convinced him to upgrade to a Ryzen 5 setup on the Core 2 Quad system, for the i7 we installed it with a fairly new power supply and it's seems to be running okay. He's hoping to upgrade it soon but we'll see.

Thanks for all the replies