Is a Pentium Gold CPU going to severely bottleneck my RTX 2060?

[Genralkidd]

Current PC Build:
Pentium Gold G5400
8 GB DDR4
RTX 2060
MSI H310M PRO-VD

This was a budget PC build I did recently to try to keep costs down. But I've decided to improve it a bit by upgrading the GTX 1050 it had to an RTX 2060. So I'm wondering how much of a bottleneck the Pentium Gold is going to be for playing more modern games? I was possibly considering upgrading to a Core i3 8100 if the Pentium Gold is really going to be an issue but I'm not sure if that's going to make much of a difference.

So with that in mind, is the Pentium Gold going to be ok for gaming? If not, how about the Core i3 8100?

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

IT'S A Huge BOTTLENECK with a Pentium. DON'T waste your money on the i3 8100.

At least get an i5 8400.

 

[WildCard999]

First off, its not going to hurt anything to run the 2060 with a G5400 as it's a surprisingly good CPU (had one for awhile) and if I were you I'd run my games in 2X DSR as that will utilize the GPU more even if the CPU is holding it back a bit due to the GPU running it at a higher res then scaling it back. Plus this will make your games look much better. But yes to fully utilize that GPU I would wait and save up for the 8400 or 9400/9500/9600 if there out at the time you can update and if there worth the money. Skip the 8100, 4 cores really isn't worth it nowadays and you'll end up wanting the 6-core i5.

 

[Genralkidd]

First off, its not going to hurt anything to run the 2060 with a G5400 as it's a surprisingly good CPU (had one for awhile) and if I were you I'd run my games in 2X DSR as that will utilize the GPU more even if the CPU is holding it back a bit due to the GPU running it at a higher res then scaling it back. Plus this will make your games look much better. But yes to fully utilize that GPU I would wait and save up for the 8400 or 9400/9500/9600 if there out at the time you can update and if there worth the money. Skip the 8100, 4 cores really isn't worth it nowadays and you'll end up wanting the 6-core i5.

Thanks for the advice! I'll probably save up for an i7 at some point then. Should I wait for the 8th gen i7's to become cheaper or go for a 9th gen i7? I saw that there's no hyperthreading on the 8 core i7's. Is that going to be worse than the 6-core i7's from the 8th gen with hyperthreading?

 

[kraelic]

Don't expect I7 8700(K) to get cheaper. Intel's improvements have been so little for so long, so 6/12 will retain its price for some time. Think it was about a wash for 6/12 vs 8 core in gaming according to gamers' nexus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuUwLuQGPj4

 

[nicholas70]

Intel products almost never become a batter value as they age. Intel does this to try to compel you to buy the latest greatest CPU vs just upgrade as you typically also have to buy a new mobo at that point which has one of Intel's chipsets. Another reason Intel prices their products this way is to help keep used CPU prices inflated further discouraging people from upgrading. I'll also point out from what I've heard and read avg 9700k outperforms 8700k by 3 to 6% on most tasks. Depending on how long it takes you to save up for one of these CPUs you might just be better off waiting for 10nm to drop in Q4 of this year. I've also heard Intel supposedly plans to release a 10-core cpu on the 14nm++ before the 10nm stuff starts to come to market. Might be worth waiting to see how that 10 core looks.

 

[ceriumin]

Even both Intel pentium and i3 will severely bottleneck your rtx2060. The minimum i can suggest as mentioned is an i5 8400.

 

[Genralkidd]

Intel products almost never become a batter value as they age. Intel does this to try to compel you to buy the latest greatest CPU vs just upgrade as you typically also have to buy a new mobo at that point which has one of Intel's chipsets. Another reason Intel prices their products this way is to help keep used CPU prices inflated further discouraging people from upgrading. I'll also point out from what I've heard and read avg 9700k outperforms 8700k by 3 to 6% on most tasks. Depending on how long it takes you to save up for one of these CPUs you might just be better off waiting for 10nm to drop in Q4 of this year. I've also heard Intel supposedly plans to release a 10-core cpu on the 14nm++ before the 10nm stuff starts to come to market. Might be worth waiting to see how that 10 core looks.

I was thinking of waiting for 10nm as well but at this point I have no idea if Intel is going to keep use the LGA 1151 (300 series) socket for the die shrink. Like you said they do keep changing their sockets and chipsets very often forcing me to buy a new motherboard. Since I just built this PC very recently, I do intend on making it last awhile. I do wish Intel CPU's were a little cheaper. There were some very low prices for ES (engineering samples) of Coffee Lake Core i7's on eBay but it seems like Engineering Samples of Intel CPU's can be kinda sketchy sometimes. It's probably better if I wait till NewEgg has some kind of sale or small discount for a new CPU.

 

[Vana Ivan Pandovski]

Intel products almost never become a batter value as they age. Intel does this to try to compel you to buy the latest greatest CPU vs just upgrade as you typically also have to buy a new mobo at that point which has one of Intel's chipsets. Another reason Intel prices their products this way is to help keep used CPU prices inflated further discouraging people from upgrading. I'll also point out from what I've heard and read avg 9700k outperforms 8700k by 3 to 6% on most tasks. Depending on how long it takes you to save up for one of these CPUs you might just be better off waiting for 10nm to drop in Q4 of this year. I've also heard Intel supposedly plans to release a 10-core cpu on the 14nm++ before the 10nm stuff starts to come to market. Might be worth waiting to see how that 10 core looks.

I was thinking of waiting for 10nm as well but at this point I have no idea if Intel is going to keep use the LGA 1151 (300 series) socket for the die shrink. Like you said they do keep changing their sockets and chipsets very often forcing me to buy a new motherboard. Since I just built this PC very recently, I do intend on making it last awhile. I do wish Intel CPU's were a little cheaper. There were some very low prices for ES (engineering samples) of Coffee Lake Core i7's on eBay but it seems like Engineering Samples of Intel CPU's can be kinda sketchy sometimes. It's probably better if I wait till NewEgg has some kind of sale or small discount for a new CPU.

That's why AMD is here, AMD nowadays becomes way better in price for performance, you can take a 6 core AMD Ryzen and add GTX 1080 ti and will not bottleneck it, way cheaper I was all my life on Intel, I had i7-3770k, and was time to get new stuff ( CPU, MB, RAM ), but with certain budget and when I saw how much money I need to buy at least a 6 core i5 and an MB it was insanely crazy, and with 390€ I managed to buy my self, AMD Ryzen 1600x, good motherboard and 16 gigs ram but If I would go with Intel I would have to pay 300€ only for the i5 CPU of Intel and the motherboards Zseries were crazy expensive like 150-250€ and the ram was 150€. So there I am decent CPU, good in any case, render, stream, gaming pretty much anything in everyday life scenario, I know Intel is Intel they are much better of course, but their price is crazy big, and AMD starts to give a lot better CPUs for way-way less cheap price.

 

[WildCard999]

First off, its not going to hurt anything to run the 2060 with a G5400 as it's a surprisingly good CPU (had one for awhile) and if I were you I'd run my games in 2X DSR as that will utilize the GPU more even if the CPU is holding it back a bit due to the GPU running it at a higher res then scaling it back. Plus this will make your games look much better. But yes to fully utilize that GPU I would wait and save up for the 8400 or 9400/9500/9600 if there out at the time you can update and if there worth the money. Skip the 8100, 4 cores really isn't worth it nowadays and you'll end up wanting the 6-core i5.

Thanks for the advice! I'll probably save up for an i7 at some point then. Should I wait for the 8th gen i7's to become cheaper or go for a 9th gen i7? I saw that there's no hyperthreading on the 8 core i7's. Is that going to be worse than the 6-core i7's from the 8th gen with hyperthreading?

Cores have better performance then threads but comparing the 9700K to the 8700K the performance in gaming and multitasking is very close to the point that I would go with whatever is cheaper at the moment. But unless your really doing a lot of multitasking I'd probably just stick with the 8400 or the 9th gen equivalent for around $200 especially if you consider a monitor upgrade as that transfers more of the gaming load from the CPU to the GPU.

 

[Tinstaafl]

Based on the options listed here, for the money I would opt for the i3-8100. It has 4 cores & 4 threads, runs at a base clock frequency of 3.6GHz.

The i5-8400 has 6 cores & 6 threads (costs 68% more), but runs at a base frequency of 2.80GHz, with turbo to 4GHz. How many games are going to be bottlenecked using 4 cores vs. 6? I would opt for the higher base clock frequency, with all other specs being roughly the same.

https://ark.intel.com/products/126688/Intel-Core-i3-8100-Processor-6M-Cache-3-60-GHz-

https://ark.intel.com/products/126687/Intel-Core-i5-8400-Processor-9M-Cache-up-to-4-00-GHz-

 

[TJ Hooker]

What refresh rate and resolution is your monitor?

 

[Genralkidd]

What refresh rate and resolution is your monitor?

It's a 4K 60hz monitor though I think at lower resolutions like 1440p it can have higher refresh rates but I've never actually tried it before.

 

[TJ Hooker]

I doubt your monitor can do higher refresh rate at lower resolution. If you're gaming at 4K, any CPU bottleneck is going to be lessened.

 

[kraelic]

Based on the options listed here, for the money I would opt for the i3-8100. It has 4 cores & 4 threads, runs at a base clock frequency of 3.6GHz.

The i5-8400 has 6 cores & 6 threads (costs 68% more), but runs at a base frequency of 2.80GHz, with turbo to 4GHz. How many games are going to be bottlenecked using 4 cores vs. 6? I would opt for the higher base clock frequency, with all other specs being roughly the same.

https://ark.intel.com/products/126688/Intel-Core-i3-8100-Processor-6M-Cache-3-60-GHz-

https://ark.intel.com/products/126687/Intel-Core-i5-8400-Processor-9M-Cache-up-to-4-00-GHz-

The i5 8400 2.8 GHz minimum will usually turbo boost all 6 cores to 3.8, 3.9 with 4 cores or less stressed, and 4.0 with a single core load.

https://www.pcgamesn.com/intel-core-i5-8400-review-benchmarks