[SOLVED] Would a GTX 1660 be 'bottlenecked' by my i3-3220 CPU?

[t1redmonkey]

Have seen the sticky on bottlenecking but a bit confused by it (not that techy). Should I really be upgrading my CPU as well if I get a GTX 1660 or will i still be able to get a noticeable benefit from sticking with my current i3-3220? I mainly stream retro games, but also play some modern games such as Two Point Hospital. I currently only have an ancient Radeon HD 7850 graphics card.

 

[cdrkf]

Have seen the sticky on bottlenecking but a bit confused by it (not that techy). Should I really be upgrading my CPU as well if I get a GTX 1660 or will i still be able to get a noticeable benefit from sticking with my current i3-3220? I mainly stream retro games, but also play some modern games such as Two Point Hospital. I currently only have an ancient Radeon HD 7850 graphics card.

Hi...

So this is really two question.... I'll answer your second question first, will you see a performance improvement from an HD 7850.... yes you will.

However, I also think the i3 3220 will bottleneck a GTX 1660 quite a bit. That needn't be a problem though, it's just worth being aware that you won't be getting the maximum performance out of the GTX 1660. If you have the money to get the GPU now, and then maybe want to look at upgrading the rest of the system later that isn't a terrible idea to get a 1660.

If you're looking to keep the setup longer term though, you could save yourself some money and get something a bit cheaper and effectively get the same performance. There were some recent tests looking back at the FX series with modern graphics cards (same generation as your i3) and essentially anything faster than a GTX 1650 Super was overkill. If you want to get a decent upgrade budget card, I'd suggest looking at the AMD RX 570 / 580 cards as they can be had very cheaply these days and are plenty fast enough for current games at 1080p Medium to high settings.

If your main title at the moment is two point though, honestly that doesn't need a lot graphics card wise, my girl friend has been playing that using the Intel integrated gpu on her i3 7100 machine and it runs fine at 720p. I think any reasonably recent mid range card would do it, GTX 1050, RX 560 or better really should be plenty for Two point.

 

[t1redmonkey]

Thank you, I was thinking of just getting an i5-3570k processor very cheaply on ebay, which seems to be the best CPU I can get on my current mobo to go along with the graphics card, and hopefully that should reduce the bottlenecking. Yeah I know Two Point Hospital isn't that intensive, but I partly am not playing other kinds of games because my PC is just not good enough at the moment. I've found a really cheap GTX 1660 which is why I was asking about that one specifically - it's the same price as the RX 580 so will probably just stick with that and then like you say I can still use it for future builds as well.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

The i3 will struggle to keep up with a GTX1660.

The i5 would be a good upgrade, though it still isn't ideal.

You could most likely install an i7 2600 or 3770 (or the k versions) as well.