Will My Graphics Card Have a Major Bottleneck?

Rockgod70 on 26/04/2022 - 19:00

I am looking at buying a 6600XT graphics card once they drop below $500.
I'm replacing an RX580 and according to all sites I've checked I should get much better graphics capabilities.
I've just bought a DELL UHD 27" monitor.
My current system is a Gigabyte B450M S2H mBoard and a Ryzen 5 2600 CPU.
I've just been reading that the MBoard is only PCIE 3.0 but the GPU is PCIE 4.0. I've also seen that the GPU is only 8X but the MBoard supports 16X.
Additionally the CPU is PCIE 3.0 X16.
I may upgrade to a Ryzen 5 5600X in the near future, but not if it doesn't provide a reasonable increase.

With all this PCIE 3.0 and 4.0 and 8X and 16X my head is starting to spin.

Is there any disadvantage to getting the 6600XT at this stage, and maybe the 5600X CPU later?

Rock

Computing Computer Component Video Card

Comments

  • Muzeeb on 26/04/2022 - 19:04
    +5

    calculator

    • nedski on 26/04/2022 - 22:30

      Ooooooooooh thanks so much for this. I have parts ready for a PC build including a 5600x. Its told me my optimum gfx card options.

    • Rockgod70 on 26/04/2022 - 22:47
      +1

      Hmm, this looks interesting, I'll have a play around with it.
      Cheers.

  • scrimshaw on 26/04/2022 - 19:17
    +3

    You could just purchase a RTX 3060 instead, it's in the $500 dollar range (currently 549) and it has full PCIE 16x lanes, meaning your PCIE 3.0 slot won't be the bottleneck.

    • Hybroid on 26/04/2022 - 19:20
      +1

      Plus DLSS which is currently far better than FidelityFX.

    • Rockgod70 on 26/04/2022 - 19:41

      I prob should mention I prefer AMD Graphics.
      I have a laptop with NVidia, but prefer AMD for my desktop.

        • iforgotmysocks on 27/04/2022 - 00:10

          You are thinking of the 420 ti.

      • scrimshaw on 26/04/2022 - 21:09
        +1

        It is not worth upgrading your mobo + CPU (spending $500+) just to have PCIE gen4 support. I would rather just buy a higher tier graphics card (6700XT for $769 and putting that into your system — the Ryzen 2600 might be old, but when you crank the resolution up to 4K the CPU bottleneck disappears.

        $769 dollars for a 16-lane GPU is still cheaper than buying a $500 8-lane GPU + $300 CPU + $180 mobo. And, it will give you better gaming performance overall.

        It would be worth upgrading your Mobo + CPU if:

        • you do something else apart from gaming that justifies upgrading the CPU to something with higher IPC & Core counts.
        • you want something from a high end chipset or motherboard that your current platform doesn't provide. For e.g you've run out of NVME M.2 slots and want a board with more PCIE lanes, or you're specifically after good VRMS for overclocking

        Yes without PCIE 4.0 support there's a bottleneck but at worst this will only impact games that have very high VRAM requirements, so it's possible that only a few games in your library will run slightly worse. If you don't want this bottleneck at all, just don't buy the 6600 and buy a higher tier GPU.

        • Rockgod70 on 26/04/2022 - 22:44

          This is quite helpful, thank you.
          Maybe with the new AM5 chips coming out the price for anything AM4 related might drop.

        • Idontusuallypost on 27/04/2022 - 12:14

          I have an RX6700XT, that replaced an RX580 8Gb, it is paired with a Ryzen 5 2600, running stock speeds, and MSI B450 Mortar (non max) plus 32Gb RAM.

          I primarily play DCS world where my CPU is certainly a bottleneck, however, in any other game that I casually play the 6700XT is just fine at 2K on my monitor or 4K on my TV.

          All games play smoothly and it is a noticeable upgrade compared to the RX580, especially in DCS world.

          Overall I am very happy with the GPU (Powercolor Hellhound) and it runs very cool and quiet.

          I have tried overclocking my CPU to 4.1GHz all cores, however, there is minimal difference in frame rates. My plan is to upgrade the CPU to a Ryzen 5 5600x or 5600 (and the motherboard if the new CPU does not work on the current mobo)

          • Rockgod70 on 27/04/2022 - 12:33

            @Idontusuallypost: I had to look up DCS World, never heard of it.
            I mainly play Guild Wars 2 these days. I used to play Far Cry and Witcher, Kingdom Come etc, but most of my time is GW2.
            It may die down and I can play something else soon.
            GW2 is quite an old game but i still can't seem to boost settings to full without it causing an issue.
            Hopefully the 6600XT will help with that.

          • scrimshaw on 27/04/2022 - 14:58
            +1

            @Idontusuallypost: The Ryzen 5 5600 is on sale for $256.50 plus postage so if you're looking for a mid lifecycle upgrade to prolong your AM4 system, this is very good value, you can also sell off your Ryzen 2600 making this upgrade cost much less

      • Godric on 26/04/2022 - 21:54

        Why do you prefer AMD Graphics?

        • Rockgod70 on 26/04/2022 - 22:43
          +2

          I've always liked AMD from their competitive CPU option against Intel to their budget friendly offerings in GPU's.
          I get the impression they listen to their market more than Nvidia and Intel so I'm all for supporting this effort.
          Might sound weird to some but it's how I've thought for the past 30 years of personal PC building.

  • DrDogRespect on 26/04/2022 - 21:04

    I have a ryzen 2600x and 6600xt setup, no problems or major bottlenecks here

    • Rockgod70 on 26/04/2022 - 22:43

      Sounds promising, thanks

  • FireRunner on 26/04/2022 - 21:24
    +1

    8x PCIe Gen 3 lanes is still fine. You might lose 2-3% performance compared to gen 4 but it's really not an issue.
    The gen 3 vs gen 4 only is an issue with the 6500 XT (and maybe possible RX 6400, still waiting on benchmarks) which only has 4x lanes

    • Rockgod70 on 26/04/2022 - 22:45

      Also helpful, cheers

  • 7ekn00 on 26/04/2022 - 22:09

    You have a 4k monitor, nothing is going to run that sufficiently short of $1000+ GPU :/

    Nvidia is your only shot with DLSS (and minimum 3070) to look half decent on a 4k monitor while gaming …

    • Rockgod70 on 26/04/2022 - 22:46

      It's not the greatest 4K monitor, its a Dell S2721QS that I got cheap when Dell had an Ebay offer.

      • 7ekn00 on 27/04/2022 - 09:59

        Doesn't matter about the quality of the monitor, if you want to run it at 4k, you need a GPU that can push that amount of pixels :/

        You can run it at lower resolutions, but monitors that do that always look "blurry" …

        The point, your GPU will always be the bottleneck at 4k and if you chose to run at lower resolutions, it's going to look crap, due to the monitor blur, no matter the GPU …

        You would have a far better visual experience with a 6600XT at 1080p on a 1080p monitor … for similar experience on 4k you need a minimum of 3070 Ti (or could get away with something like a 3060Ti using DLSS / image scaling)

    • freefall101 on 27/04/2022 - 08:49

      The 3060 ti works pretty well at 4K, definitely game dependent and relies a lot on DLSS but I've been using that for the last 8 or 9 months or so. Although I've also been playing Horizon Zero Dawn, not CP77.

      Champing at the bit for a 4070 though.

  • [Deactivated] on 27/04/2022 - 04:34
    -1

    Just a heads up, I was playing with the bottleneck calculator and it seems, if you're in the market for a newer INTEL cpu for a 6600xt, the highest you should go is the i5 10400 series without any GPU bottlenecking, apparently. You already have a little bit of GPU bottlenecking with a 11400.

    • NuclearWessels on 27/04/2022 - 08:01

      CPUs help system performance in other areas.. it's not all about gaming. I'd say buying an i5 chip thats two (soon to be three) generations out of date to avoid an on paper GPU bottleneck is very shortsighted

      • [Deactivated] on 27/04/2022 - 15:56
        +1

        Well true, but for a new build.. 😅

        I went through that website and it's only apparently CPU bottlenecked with a 6600xt when you go the 11 series in gaming. But apart from that it's like neck and neck for "general use" and even "CPU utilisation" category. I'm not sure, that's why I used the website. Also, I probably forgot to mention in terms of i5's. Ofcourse you could probably go up to an even lower i7 to achieve roughly the same results.

        But I see what you're saying. I also forgot to mention, I recently impulse bought a 6600xt for cheappp and the NZXT N7 Z590 so it was just more so what I thought is the best bang for buck in these restrictions. Could you possibly recommend something else that may fit so I could research? I'm not really sure how to properly compare builds with certain parameters via pcpartpicker.. 😅

        Thanks anyway.

  • toomuchdogfur on 27/04/2022 - 13:28

    PCI-E 4.0x 8x vs PCI-E 3.0 8x bottlenecking on the 6600XT is minimal - you're only going to see a big difference if you're pushing super high frame rates (>150FPS). If you're gaming at 1080p with high quality settings or 1440p and above, you'd be hard pressed to see any differences at all.

    TechSpot did a back to back comparison of this very scenario (see section PCI Express Testing).

    GamersNexus also did similar testing on a GTX 1080 a few years ago (which performs similarly to your 6600XT = RTX 2070 = GTX 1080). Note this one was PCI-E 3.0 16x vs 3.0 8x, but the bandwidth numbers are roughly the same to your PCI-E 4.0 8x vs PCI-E 3.0 8x.

    • Rockgod70 on 27/04/2022 - 13:51

      Thanks for that, was a good read.

Login or Join to leave a comment
Login Join