gtx 970 Bottlenecking

[Daniel Holt]

I am currently on the fence of either scrapping my current system (going on 6 years old) or trying to salvage what I can and do some upgrades.

Currently I Have a
CPU: Amd Phenom II X6 1050T
Ram: 4.00 GB DDR3
MB: Asus M4A87TD EVO (AM3)
GPU: 1024MB ATI AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series
HD: 596GB Western Digital WDC WD6402AAEX-00Z3A0 ATA Device (SATA)
Power supply: 700w ATX

I was thinking of building something around the gtx 970...now according to parts picker I believe my current setup is compatible, but im not really to sure on how well it would run?!? I have been looking at other parts to put with the gtx, if I need to just scrap what I have now.

ASRock 970 Pro3 R2.0 ATX AM3+ Motherboard
AMD FX-8350 4.0GHz 8-Core Processor
Asus GeForce GTX 970 4GB STRIX Video Card

Any help or changes would be very much appreciated!!! I am honestly not a very tech savvy individual just love to play me some vidddgy-o games!!!!

 

[migronesien]

Once you are going with a high end Graphics card like the GTX 970, I recommend you go for an intel motherboard and just get at least a decent i5 processor..... That AMD FX-8350 will definitely pull back the 970..

No, a 8350 is one of the few AMD CPUs that won't bottleneck a GTX 970.

 

[Daniel Holt]

Once you are going with a high end Graphics card like the GTX 970, I recommend you go for an intel motherboard and just get at least a decent i5 processor..... That AMD FX-8350 will definitely pull back the 970..

Hmm I guess im confused on how to figure out what goes with what? the benchmark puts the 8350 above the i5 so I assumed it was better! xP. Im trying to stay around the 600$ range. I have the tower, power supply, and im not sure if my hard drive needs to be upgraded or not? so maybe all I need is more ram? gpu,cpu and mb?

 

[garrett1986]

and OC'd 8350 will squash almost any I5 in multi threaded situations

and OC'd I5 will squash an 8350 in older titles and games that are poorly optomized (most pre 2014 games)

I5 can provide an upgrade path for the future but honestly you would probably keep it long enough to have to replace the motherboard as well

8350 has no real upgrade path but it will perform well enough into the future that you will also likely replace the motherboard by the time you upgrade as well.

if you get an 8350 get a decent motherboard and a good cooler so you can OC it (most can hit 4.5-5ghz depending on cooling/PSU/ motherboard)

if you get and I5 make sure its a quad core and get a good cooler so you can OC it (most can hit 4.2-4.6 ghz depending on cooling/PSU/motherboard)

overall an I5 quadcore will probably feel snappier and more responsive because of superior IPC's and an 8350 will scale better with multimedia tasks games like farcry4, fallout 4, space engineers, witcher 3 and modern games that will make use of the 8 cores.

and I5 is about $50 more expensive then an 8350

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117372&Tpk=5-4690K

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113284&cm_re=fx_8350-_-19-113-284-_-Product

neither will bottleneck a GTX970.

but i really must recommend a good R9 390 over a GTX 970. the 3.5gb of video memory is a real limitation and is only acceptable because of compression but it will not hold up over time as games demand more video memory.

where as a 390 is as powerful as GTX 980 in terms of raw hardware and has 8gb of video memory (overkill for sure), a much wider memory bus (will hold up better over time) and its performance has increased with every driver update where as the GTX970 is already at peak performance and has little to gain from further driver optimizations.

generally speaking AMD CPUS pair better with Nvidia GPUS because they reaquire slightly less CPU overhead because of driver optimizations

generally speaking Intel CPU's pair better with AMD GPU's because they have the IPC to work around less optimized drivers and end up "feeding" the GPU with data faster allowing it to flex its raw horsepower more effectively.

 

[shaolin_thumbs]

If you are in uk forget newegg.
Scan is generally cheaper than partpicker.
Get an xfx r9 390 black edition over the nvidia 3.5 gb card,have a look on youtube for comparison videos.
Ddr4 isn't too relevant yet buy a mobo that's ddr3 and check its 4 channel .
Get a 850w psu,it might seem overkill but will come in handy if you want to add another gpu .

 

[shaolin_thumbs]

I5 4690k is good and is a good overclocking chip.you should be able to buy a good machine for about £800