Should I Overclock?

[Lil_Vinnie]

I'm Building a PC tomorrow i have a Gigabyte AMD 970- Gaming motherboard with a AMD FX 6300, 8GB DDR3 1866Mhz  Ram, Samsung 850 Evo and 2 1TB HD with a GTX 1060 OC Windforce from Gigabyte, what would the bottle neck be?  if its the CPU should i overclock it or should i buy a new one if so what should i over clock it too or what one should i get?

 

- thanks for you time. Vincent

[Bestbuyguy]

Your FX 6300 should be absolutely fine with the 1060 in gaming task, if your doing other CPU intensive task, consider getting a better Intel CPU like a Core i5-6600. And whether you want to overclock your CPU or not is completely up to you. If you don't trust yourself or think your PSU is too dodgy, or think your cooler is inadequate, just don't do it. Overcloking your CPU is so meaningless in gaming task, it's mostly for experimenting or tinkering.

[Emberstone]

17 minutes ago, Bestbuyguy said:

Your FX 6300 should be absolutely fine with the 1060 in gaming task, if your doing other CPU intensive task, consider getting a better Intel CPU like a Core i5-6600. And whether you want to overclock your CPU or not is completely up to you. If you don't trust yourself or think your PSU is too dodgy, or think your cooler is inadequate, just don't do it. Overcloking your CPU is so meaningless in gaming task, it's mostly for experimenting or tinkering.

Whether or not overclocking affects gaming also depends on the CPU and the games being played. Some games actually do bottleneck an i5-6600K and would benefit from overclocking because of the lack of hyperthreading, especially if you're aiming for high refresh rate gaming or if you want to record/stream.

 

Some games showed a substantial FPS increase after I overclocked my 980X to 4.0 GHz. Heroes of the Storm went from 30 fps in teamfights to the lowest I've ever seen anywhere being 55. It's because that game uses only one core, and my processor was built for multithreaded workloads. (916 in Cinebench multi-core, but 121 in single-core after the overclock).

 

As for the OP, your bottleneck is the FX 6300. It's pretty old and not all that great these days. You'll feel its age in CPU-bound games, and in those cases your GTX 1060 probably won't be fully utilized. Even if you overclock it, the processor is still pretty weak and the overall scenario remains the same.

 

Your best bet is to get away from AM3+ altogether these days if you're still able. If not, an FX 8000 series processor will serve you a good bit better than the 6300, but it'll still only take you so far. FX processors in general have pretty weak single-core performance, and that's what matters for gaming.

 

That's not to say you're screwed with the 6300 and that the sky is falling or anything, it's just not the best option out there anymore. If you don't expect amazing settings in every game, you'll be fine.