Question Should I pair a 1660 or 1660ti with my i7 3770?

[Bae-lish]

I have a non-k 3770. I won't be overclocking it. But I'll overclock the gpu. And have 2x8gb 1600mhz DDR3 ram. My monitor is 1080p 60hz.

I'll use it solely for gaming and won't upgrade in at least 5 years. This include mostly AAA games.

So should investing a little more on the ti-version will give me that much benefit in the future, or bottlenecking will minimize any performance difference to nothing?

 

[pickledkitty13]

1660ti

 

[whiteknighter]

Take the GTX 1660ti, although your monitor will bottleneck with the GPU but in term of performance, it will last longer than non ti.

 

[justin.m.beauvais]

On average you'll probably have a significant CPU bottleneck if you went with the 1660Ti, but it all comes down to what games you'll be playing and at what resolution. Some games will be more CPU intensive and you'll really see the old 3770 hurting performance, other games will be more GPU intensive and the 1660 will be free to give all it has. With the 1660Ti you will run into games that are normally GPU intensive but the GPU will be running fast enough that the CPU can't feed it anymore, and you won't see any difference between the 1660 and 1660Ti on CPU intensive games as the CPU will still be holding things back.

If there is one constant in the universe it is that AAA games eat resources. Whether it is something like Crysis that pushes graphics cards to the limit through poor optimization or Assassin's Creed which melts CPUs with DRM, you'll always run into games that are difficult to run... and the 3770 isn't getting any faster. As a result, I'm not sure that a 5 year upgrade cycle with an already old CPU and a mid range card is a reasonable thing. I understand the lack of money, but CPUs have a 5 year span on expected viability, and graphics cards even less, with the expectation being about 3 years on a midrange card for AAA titles.

If it were just speed there wouldn't be a problem. 6 year old hardware could hang with modern games without issue if it was computational speed alone. There are also additional technological advancements that happen to improve performance, and older hardware will take a big performance hit simply because the old stuff doesn't support it. I'm not sure a 3770 will stand the test of time much longer, especially since AAA games are getting to the point where they recommend 6th gen Intel CPUs (heck, VR games already require a 4th gen CPU). It won't be long until they are requiring them. I'd say the 3770 has about 2 years of new release AAA gaming left in it.

The 1660 though should be good for 4-5 years. Right now it is a good investment. You'll have a few good years as a mid-range card before things move on and you have something more akin to a current GTX 1050 or 750 Ti. Both of those are still good cards and play just about any game you throw at them, but they are decidedly lower end and require you to play at reduced settings.

I would suggest in about 2 years time looking for a CPU, motherboard, and RAM upgrade. I just don't think you are going to get 5 more years out of an i7 3770 if you want to keep playing new games. Plus, it is easier to justify getting the 1660Ti if you are planning an upgrade because you'll see more of an upgrade once you get your new hardware as the current hardware would be holding the 1660Ti back.

 

[Bae-lish]

On average you'll probably have a significant CPU bottleneck if you went with the 1660Ti, but it all comes down to what games you'll be playing and at what resolution. Some games will be more CPU intensive and you'll really see the old 3770 hurting performance, other games will be more GPU intensive and the 1660 will be free to give all it has. With the 1660Ti you will run into games that are normally GPU intensive but the GPU will be running fast enough that the CPU can't feed it anymore, and you won't see any difference between the 1660 and 1660Ti on CPU intensive games as the CPU will still be holding things back.

If there is one constant in the universe it is that AAA games eat resources. Whether it is something like Crysis that pushes graphics cards to the limit through poor optimization or Assassin's Creed which melts CPUs with DRM, you'll always run into games that are difficult to run... and the 3770 isn't getting any faster. As a result, I'm not sure that a 5 year upgrade cycle with an already old CPU and a mid range card is a reasonable thing. I understand the lack of money, but CPUs have a 5 year span on expected viability, and graphics cards even less, with the expectation being about 3 years on a midrange card for AAA titles.

If it were just speed there wouldn't be a problem. 6 year old hardware could hang with modern games without issue if it was computational speed alone. There are also additional technological advancements that happen to improve performance, and older hardware will take a big performance hit simply because the old stuff doesn't support it. I'm not sure a 3770 will stand the test of time much longer, especially since AAA games are getting to the point where they recommend 6th gen Intel CPUs (heck, VR games already require a 4th gen CPU). It won't be long until they are requiring them. I'd say the 3770 has about 2 years of new release AAA gaming left in it.

The 1660 though should be good for 4-5 years. Right now it is a good investment. You'll have a few good years as a mid-range card before things move on and you have something more akin to a current GTX 1050 or 750 Ti. Both of those are still good cards and play just about any game you throw at them, but they are decidedly lower end and require you to play at reduced settings.

I would suggest in about 2 years time looking for a CPU, motherboard, and RAM upgrade. I just don't think you are going to get 5 more years out of an i7 3770 if you want to keep playing new games. Plus, it is easier to justify getting the 1660Ti if you are planning an upgrade because you'll see more of an upgrade once you get your new hardware as the current hardware would be holding the 1660Ti back.

thank you for your detailed answer, but would the 1660ti still heavily bottleneck my 3770 even if I turn down the cpu intensive settings in the graphics options of the games? And will this bottleneck happen always or only in certain scenes in games like AC: Odyssey?

 

[justin.m.beauvais]

Oh the 1660Ti isn't going to bottleneck the 3770... the 3770 is going to bottleneck the 1660Ti. The only way to alleviate it is going to be to crank the graphics settings so your GPU has to do more work than the CPU.

At the disparity in performance we are talking about, it is going to happen in most games. It is hard to tell by how much because I've never seen this setup tested, but similar setups with similar CPUs (i7 2600K or i7 3770K) and a GTX 1070 (a similar in performance GPU to the 1660Ti) show some pretty bad bottlenecks in CPU heavy games, sometimes around 20%-30% performance lost compared to the same GPU with a faster CPU. That said, some more graphics intensive games may actually balance out so you are getting the most out of both CPU and GPU, but those instances will be pretty rare.

A CPU bottleneck is a pretty bad thing when you are gaming. If you are doing anything else in the background, like have a browser open, or Discord, or even have a heavy load of background tasks like anti-virus, you can significantly hurt performance. Not to mention that the CPU is going to be maxed out, generating all the heat all the time, so you're cooling needs to be on point. In most cases I'd much rather have a GPU bottleneck, where the GPU is running flat out, but the CPU has resources to spare. Sure, you are taxing the GPU, but background tasks aren't going to hurt performance nearly as badly.