how much bottleneck?

[kjbrown972]

hi there,

so its my birthday in a few days, and i was hoping to upgrade my enitre pc. my dad just told me i can only upgrade the gpu though. my plan was to get a 670 and fx-8320.

here are my current specs:

cpu: amd athlon 2 x4 640

gpu: nvidia gts 8800 320mb

CM elite 430 case

ocz coreXstream 500w psu

1tb hdd

corsair vengeance 4gb ram

asrock motherboard

the only change happening now is the 8800 being changed out for a 670

now i know there will be bottleneck, but i want to know how severe it will be. i could go for like a 660 and save money, but if i upgrade in the future it won't be as good as i want. i have heard that i can still mostly get around 60fps on 1080p on things like bf3? that is all i care about.

thanks

[No One Puts A Real Name]

is it just for gaming?

[joelthezombie15]

shouldnt be to bad i dont think its a 4 core cpu at 4ghz if you havent OCed it so that seems ok. if anything your cpu was being bottlenecked by the current gpu. maybe get a 660ti and get a second for sli later.

[killerx525]

You need to overclock your CPU just to reduce the bottleneck.

[No One Puts A Real Name]

shouldnt be to bad i dont think its a 4 core cpu at 4ghz if you havent OCed it so that seems ok. if anything your cpu was being bottlenecked by the current gpu. maybe get a 660ti and get a second for sli later.

i was gonna say that but yeah.

[kjbrown972]

thats what i meant, its gonna bottleneck the gpu, its quad core at 3ghz, i will mostly use it for gaming but maybe start youtube so rendering as well

[Leonard]

Firstly, the 670 is almost exact for the 500w PSU and believe me you will want to overclock it. a 7770, 7870, 7790, 650ti Boost would be better choices because it is wise to leave some head room for the PSU to be able to not work at the limit.

Secondly, If you upgrade to an FX8320 you will have the head room for the PSU but the processor will be over kill for your system. Look at a FX6300.

Thirdly, everyone seems to overlook the HDD as a bottle neck but in order for a fast GPU and CPU to access programs the HDD needs to be fast or the bottleneck would arise.

So my advice to you would be to use the money that the 670 would cost and get one of the aforementioned GPUs and the aforementioned CPU. This way you will get a better alround experience in what ever you are doing once you don't exceed any system requirements needed but a particular software.

Hope this helps you in making a more informed decision.