Okay i have peices ready for me, my brother, and now my gaming dad wants a gaming computer, he has a intel core i3 2120 processor, he only wants a new graphics card for around $250 that can handle bf3 etc. and ofc we dont want his processor to bottleneck, but he wanted an gtx 660, but i dont know if it will handle an i3. I have 1 gtx 660 but i have a i5. Thanks
http://teksyndicate.com/forum/other-hardware/bottle-necking/130807
That will most likely bottleneck itself. The i3's are not optimized for gaming really, and do not OC that well and tend to be quite weak.
mm, really you need a quad core for gaming, although the current cpu is hyper threaded, its still not as good a real cores. so i would recommend an i5 3570k, or 2500k. you can just take out the i3 and put either of those 2 in and your done.
hope this helps,
tom
Dual cores can be used for mid-level gaming. Razer's Razer Blade helps reinforce this fact, but it will completely bottleneck a GTX 660.
well as he has a job ill probably push him to buy an i5, thanks guys :)
I5 or 6300 is the way to go for value + gaming
i dunno where your getting your info but an i3 2120 will not bottleneck a single or dual threaded game on any gfx card up to a 680...
check the numbers for starcraft 2 there pretty close to the 3550k the only time it will struggle will be on game engines like frostbyte which require real cores over hyperthreaded but it will still hold its own when compared to a turban or bulldoser. the i3 2120 will match pretty much any amd cpu up to the 6300 on most games so is in no way a weak cpu for gaming...
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/gaming-processor-frame-rate-performance,review-32628-8.html
there are plenty of games benched in this round up and you can see for yourself the 2120 copes well.
oh and dont bother crying foul as tom's has picked a test sweet that shows amd in a good light and is much less bias that some other sites.
a quad core is a better choice but not for the reason of weak gameing. its a better idea as more and more games will use 4 or more threads so to get a little more gaming longevety out of a system a quad core would be a better choice. in real world testing your conna loose about 5% perfomance per virtual thread so untill games move past 4 the 2120 will be adiquarte unless the game wants to use 100% of the core which many wont even if they are quad threaded.
but if he got a 6300, he'd have to get a new motherboard aswell
the i3 wont bottleneck any game really unless its poorly optimized or extremely CPU intensive (there might be a lot more of this happening in the future), so you should be fine for now if you buy something along the lines of a 7950 in performance.
I would advise against going for a complete CPU upgrade as his i3 will be fine in most games. Games tend to rely more on the GPU than CPU, so bottlenecking really won't be an issue unless games some how become completely CPU intensive. the i3 will do just fine with the GTX 660 and you won't feel any bottlenecks.
I had a A8 3800 that bottlenecked my GTX 670 hardcore, and the A8 3800 is a quad core
The A8 3800 is not as powerful as the i3 2120 and your using a more powerful videocard than the videocard in question, which is the GTX 660. We're looking at the i3 2120 + GTX 660, since these have less of a gap than the A8 3800 + GTX 670, the bottleneck wouldn't even be noticable if it even had one.
the a8 gets 20% of its performanc from threading through the gpu basically it offloads some perfomance onto the gpu to get a boost in over all grunt.
as soon as you pair it with a dedicated gpu you loose that 20% and end up with a cpu thats about as stron as a dual core athlon. thus the bottlenecking. in fact it would bottleneck on pretty much any gfx card past a gtx 260 or 4870.
the a8 is an ultra budget multi media part that will allow gaming in a limited fashion. which results in good perfomance on an all in 1 system.
the i3 is a entry level gaming part which will gave good gaming perfomance 1s you move off the intergrated gpu gfx the real power of the cpu can be unleashed.
my guess is you were thinking because the a8 gives better perfomance than the i3 when no dedicated cards are used it would out perfom it when a dedicated card is used. this isnt the case. when a dedicated card is used with an i3 the breaks are taken off and the i3 opens up a real perfomance gap.
in real terms amd are still a generation of arcitecture behind. they run on bigger dyes with less transistors the higher latencies were compenssated for when the on chip gpu was used but they show up when you switch to the dedicated gfx card. because the intel is made a different way any latency that the cpu has doesnt change when a gfx card is added. so in real terms the a8 slows down dramatically while the i3 doesnt.
doubleagent you should really learn about how to make a balanced pc.
you canty just go off what generation they are, you have to go off many things. core count, per thread perfomance, transistor count, fpu though put, memory bandwidth, latencies all come in to play.
if your gonna spend 700 on a gpu you want to pair it with at least a 200+ cpu to make sure theres no chance of a bottleneck but price isnt everything.
just because its a new cpu it doesnt mean its more powerful. you have to look at what the cpu is designed to do. the a8 and a10 are designed for systems that need a long battery life or low power consumption rather than high balls to the wall perfomance. yes you get good perfomance from them but if you compare them to a dedicated desktop cpu you will see there pretty weak.
dont get me wrong amd are on to a great thing with there apu but as a desktop gaming part its pretty much useless.
amds gaming parts currently consist of 3 cpus the phenom turban, the fx 6300 and 8350 if you dont have 1 of these in your system, you dont have a gaming grade amd system. that may sound harsh but i see it every day on toms. why is my fx 4100 stuttering on my 560ti, simple its not up to scratch as far as single threaded perfomance goes. its actually weaker per core than the amd athlon x2 6000+ and that cpu could just hand a hd 4850 without bottlenecking.
what im getting at is you need to get a better understanding of the arcitecture and how it relates to both old and new hardware requirments. even how it compares to single core perfomance on older cpus. 1s you understand this you will be able to build a system that doesnt bottleneck on any game and will play more games for a longer period...
like i put in your other thread. i built an amd x2 6000+ with a 8800gt. it still plays games today nearly 6 years later. admitedly at minimum but it still plays them because it was a well balanced machine.