I3 2120 gtx 680

[markuk1]

hi can anyone tell me if my i3 2120 would be holding my games back at 2560x1400 with full aa as i am getting a bit of lag in games and im guessing its just the gpu isnt powerfull enough but just thought i would see what people think any way!!

 

[cool07ist]

a gtx 680 can handle games at that resoltions pretty nicely. the culprit is your cpu. A i3 2120 isnt strong enough to provide as much as speed as a gtx 680, a 2nd or 3rd gen core i5 surely will give you more average minimum fps. but it all matters at what settings are you running games at.is it on high or on low settings. personally, i feel if you tax your gpu to the limit like cranking up all visual settings in that big display, then i feel i3 2120 might keep up with the card. And what games you play?

 

[BeastLeeX]

could be a bottleneck, look here: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/289?vs=288 . It seems to do somewhat bad in games that like processor power, but i dont see why it wouldnt keep a game above 30+ fps, even at 2560x1440. maybe its the gtx 680 vram, Had you looked into 7970? In higher resolutions it starts to pull ahead or is on par with the 680.

 

[manofchalk]

That is the 2nd most powerful single GPU card on the market, I doubt its holding performance back.
You have paired a low end CPU with a super high end GPU, I think its fairly obvious. Get a Core i5 or i7, and chances are your issue will clear itself up (unless you are also running 2GB of 1066Mhz RAM, that might bottleneck it as well :lol.

 

[Surgeking]

Have you bought either yet? they aren't ideal matches is all. Up the CPU to at least i5, or lower the GPU, 670 is a great card and is up near the 680 but for less money

I think everyone would agree that they rather up the CPU for more power if they had a choice =)

 

[markuk1]

i am playing games like crysis 1+2 red orchestra 2 these are the only games iv really noticed any lad in i play with every thing maxed at that res eg: crysis 16Q aa everything very high @2560x1440

 

[geekapproved]

i3-2120 will not bottleneck a GTX680. It's clocked just as high as a 2500K and cpu cores have no relation to gpu bottlenecking.

Also at such a high resolution, most of the load is shifted to the gpu.

However, a dual core cpu will hold you back in games that require more than 2 cores, but this is not a case of the cpu bottlenecking the graphics cards, it's a case of the cpu bottlenecking the game.

These games are mostly MMO's and other huge multiplayer maps like BF3.

 

[Traciatim]

A nice quick and simple way to determine if it's a CPU problem vs a GPU/Res problem is to turn off GPU intensive features like AA and run through a few tests and see if your FPS changes by all that much.

If you go from 16x AA to AA disabled and your FPS doesn't change, then certainly your CPU is just not feeding data to your GPU fast enough. You could also drop the resolution down to 1920x1080. The reason game benchmarks that are testing CPU's are run at low resolutions is that resolution and anti-aliasing are functions that are vastly GPU intensive.

 

[richardgal]

I'd say go for it. If you're mainly planning on playing shooters or racing games, the i3-2120 will NOT hold you back, not even a bit. I own this processor and it gave me the average of 45 fps with an HD 6850 at 1440x900 Ultra BF3. If you're not the kind of guy who's into stuff like video editing or massive MMOs, it will give a rocking performance, considering that after 1680x1050, the CPU sorta stops to really matter anyway. (UNLESS you're playing really badly coded games like GTA 4!) However if you want to make sure your pc is ready for everything, save a few bucks by going with an HD 7970 which might also give you better fps on higher resolutions, and take a lower end Sandy i5 into consideration.

 

[wastanley734]

hi can anyone tell me if my i3 2120 would be holding my games back at 2560x1400 with full aa as i am getting a bit of lag in games and im guessing its just the gpu isnt powerfull enough but just thought i would see what people think any way!!

Bought a GTX 650 got same 7.2 in windows experience index. same as ur cpu so a 650 would be dead even in performance. but game are becoming more gpu oriented and code 4 cpu is becoming simpler n simpler. good enough until we have 2 install games on disc from bluray discs.