i5 6500's are going for about £90 on the MM it seems. I recently bought an i3 6100 brand new and I think it's bottle necking with my 470. Is an i5 6500 much of a step up

I'd say so, judging by this video:

link

That's a really good price too, need to step up my forum game and get on the mm myself

Check out this youtube link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJuadijvTSU

i5-6500 vs i3-6100 | GTX 970 OC | 2560 x 1440

Granted this is a 970, but there are a few FPS different most the time, i dont know why you think the CPU is a bottleneck in your setup,i dont know what resolution you game at, or what FPS you get in your current games, or in fact much about any of your setup, but for the money you would spend on changing your CPU, i don't think you will see much gain in performance.

the I5 has 4 cores and 4 threads and the I3 has 2 cores and 4 threads.

normally the I5s are for gaming

Biomorphs said:

Check out this youtube link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJuadijvTSU

Click to expand...

That's the exact video I linked.

Honestly if I were you OP, if you have a compatible motherboard and suitable cooling, I'd try overclocking the i3 before spending more money, and see how much performance you gain. If you don't gain anything, then you're not CPU limited, and upgrading will not likely show much benefit.

Be sure to use msi afterburner/rivatuner stat server to put cpu and gpu usage overlays on, if you don't already.

I don't really think you can overclock i3's can you? The issue I'm having is when I'm playing Overwatch I'm at 60FPS most of the time but sometimes when I dip below this I'll get stutters and I assumed it was because of the i3 and my 470

Yeah there's non-K overclocking available on certain skylake boards, you just have to make sure you're using the correct BIOS revision, as on later boards/revisions it was patched out.

OCUK used to sell pre-overclocked non-k skylake bundles if I remember correctly.

What motherboard do you have?

i3-6100 can be overclocked on quite a lot of boards, I was contemplating it before going with my i5-6400. I have that running at 4.5Ghz, your i3 should be able to hit something similar.

Drake5 said:

I don't really think you can overclock i3's can you? The issue I'm having is when I'm playing Overwatch I'm at 60FPS most of the time but sometimes when I dip below this I'll get stutters and I assumed it was because of the i3 and my 470

Click to expand...

Not sure what settings and res you are on but Overwatch on an i3-6100 and 1060 my wife's computer maintains over 100fps on ultra at 1080p. I've been thoroughly impressed with the i3-6100 and 1060 combo

AMD DX11 CPU overhead in effect, the i3 might not bottle the Nvidia 970 buy it certainly will bottle the radeon.

I use an i3 4130 with a 1060 and it's all good. I avoided an AMD offering as I know a lower end CPU would struggle with an AMD card.

I found out it was because I had an application open that was using my CPU

Glad you have found the issue.

Now get that processor overclocked and see how you get on!!!