Help Choosing GPU for Older Processor

[jjblanche]

Hey guys I have a Q6600 OCed to 3.6 GHz. After seeing some benchmarks and running a few of my own tests I'm convinced this CPU still has quite a bit of life in it for practical gaming purposes. Looking to finally replace my old GPU and I'm trying to decide which way to go...

I've decided to stick with nVidia (love AMD and the red team but I have my reasons) and narrowed it down to either the GTX 660 or the GTX 760. On the surface the easy answer is 760 but with the way I game and etc I could see getting up to 4 years life out of that card and although the Q6600 is keeping up just fine right now my worry is that in a few years it might begin to really show its age. In simple terms I don't want the GPU to outlive the usefulness of the CPU.

I'm probably overthinking things as usual so I'll just ask directly: Which card would you guys go with given the above, 660 or 760?

As somewhat of an aside my mobo only supports pci express 2.0, versus the 3.0 standard these new cards come rated for. Would that be a problem/bottleneck in this case?

 

[revolution2718]

How about a 670? It slightly beats the 760, and can be had for a good price right now.

 

[potpolima]

don't worry about pci-e 2.0...
your cpu is old and weak and surely will bottleneck gtx 660 or hd7850

 

[jjblanche]

don't worry about pci-e 2.0...
your cpu is old and weak and surely will bottleneck gtx 660 or hd7850

You know I was thinking more or less the same thing myself but then I found these benchmarks: Q6600 vs i7

They more or less prove two things: Most contemporary games by a fairly wide margin are GPU bound and as a result the Q6600 overclocked hangs right up there with a modern i7 in all but the most CPU intensive games. At 3.6 GHz it'll hang with or surpass AMD processors circa 2011-2012 which is just fine by me.

That aside I hadn't really considered the 670. I'll have to give it a look.