11400 & 5060ti, too much of a bottleneck?

[Armadillo]

Current system is
11400 with power limits off
32GB CL16 In Gear 1
1080/144 monitor.
1070ti

11400 has quite a gap between power limits enforced or not and gear 1or gear 2, so here is techpowerup review of it including that config.
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-core-i5-11400f/15.html. On average it sits around stock 11600k/10600k/9900k.

Originally, I intended to pair it with a 3060ti all those years ago, but didn’t bother because GPU market went mental.
I mostly play esports (mostly overwatch) games and indie games which run fine, but there are enough newer games that I was thinking about an upgrade (Alan wake 2, Doom, Indiana Jones, Talos Principle 2, space marine 2), that either do not run at all (no rt) or not acceptably.
So my original plan was to pair it up with a 5060ti and then not worry about bottlenecks, because next year I will upgrade to something on the AM5 platform. Of course now someone went “GPUs below msrp, cpus cheap and plentiful competition, and ram is cheap, PC market finally sorting itself out, can’t have that” and ram has gone mental. So that plan has gone out the window.So now I likely have to stick with what I have for the foreseeable future or they decide to stop price fixing and the ram comes back down to ok levels.

I did find someone playing doom with a 3060ti youtube.com/watch?v=T-nQXjvJsqk. Doesn’t say whether power limits are off or gear1/2 ram, seems be mostly ok feeding a 3060ti, but 5060ti is at least +30% on that, it feels like it might be a bit too much.

Searching is a mixed bag, with some people saying fine for a pairing of that sort of gpu power and others saying nah, they have something around there in gpu power and the cpu holds it back more often than not, some even at 1440. A lot of the games I’m looking at do appear to be cpu heavy ish as well.

So now I’m kinda stuck. Plan of GPU now, cpu after Christmas is out the window. Can’t afford both now. CPU upgrade if I got the 5060ti would be whenever sanity returns, who knows when that would be.
Can’t go AMD even with lower overhead because AMD refuse to fix overwatch compiling shaders every single time you launch ever since they added dxnavi with rdna2. That’s my main game, so as long as I play that and AMD refuse to fix, I’m stuck with Nvidia.
Monitor won’t be getting upgraded either, 24” is the perfect size for my small space, which generally means 1080.

Other option if people feel it’s too much of a bottleneck to be the smart move is to stick to my indie games and esports and wait for it to all blow over, then do both. I do have a ps5 (not really a fan of it & would prefer to play on pc) so some of titles I want I could play there for now or just save until next year, to do both at the same time and hope the damage is not too much.

So thoughts? Ok?, bottleneck but won’t be terrible? Or a bridge too far for the 11400 and waste until I can do cpu and gpu at once?

Thanks.

 

[Tetras]

What do you have now and what are you trying to achieve with the upgrade?

That's more important to me, than what the bottleneck is (or will not be).

Yes, some games will suffer with your CPU, but it isn't THAT slow, it is good enough to get decent playable performance from the vast majority of games.

 

[jigger]

You definitely aren’t going to get full performance out of the GPU. You can offset the bottleneck to some extent by running at higher resolutions, but Nvidia cards really to need a high spec system.

 

[Armadillo]

What do you have now and what are you trying to achieve with the upgrade?

That's more important to me, than what the bottleneck is (or will not be).

Yes, some games will suffer with your CPU, but it isn't THAT slow, it is good enough to get decent playable performance from the vast majority of games.

Whoops forgot the gpu, it's a 1070ti, added it to original post now. I haven't upgraded in ages and the ram nonsense throwing my potential plans out the window and my brain running in circles has just fried it.

GPU upgrade is mostly because I want to play a few bigger titles (mostly listed in the original post) that my 1070ti either can't run at all (no RT) or doesn't run acceptably (gpu too weak) & not make my main game (overwatch) worse in the process. Outside of those bigger titles that don't run, everything else is good. Will probably want to play the new resident evil when that comes out as well.

5060ti is just kinda the default choice as AMD is out because of overwatch and anything below feels like a bad buy because of 8GB of vram and price.

You definitely aren’t going to get full performance out of the GPU. You can offset the bottleneck to some extent by running at higher resolutions, but Nvidia cards really to need a high spec system.

Have to stay with Nvidia because of overwatch and shader comp issue on amd. I fully expect a bottleneck of some sort, just not sure if it will be an acceptable one or "this feels like a waste" if you know what I mean.

 

[Tetras]

GPU upgrade is mostly because I want to play a few bigger titles (mostly listed in the original post) that my 1070ti either can't run at all (no RT) or doesn't run acceptably (gpu too weak) & not make my main game (overwatch) worse in the process. Outside of those bigger titles that don't run, everything else is good. Will probably want to play the new resident evil when that comes out as well.

Then I'd do it. A 5060 Ti will get you onto the newer feature set to play those games and when it can give you it (CPU permitting), it'll be a large performance upgrade on the existing card.

What motherboard do you have? There have been reports of both Z490 and Z590 boards having issues with 5000 cards.

 

[jigger]

Whoops forgot the gpu, it's a 1070ti, added it to original post now. I haven't upgraded in ages and the ram nonsense throwing my potential plans out the window and my brain running in circles has just fried it.

GPU upgrade is mostly because I want to play a few bigger titles (mostly listed in the original post) that my 1070ti either can't run at all (no RT) or doesn't run acceptably (gpu too weak) & not make my main game (overwatch) worse in the process. Outside of those bigger titles that don't run, everything else is good. Will probably want to play the new resident evil when that comes out as well.

5060ti is just kinda the default choice as AMD is out because of overwatch and anything below feels like a bad buy because of 8GB of vram and price.




Have to stay with Nvidia because of overwatch and shader comp issue on amd. I fully expect a bottleneck of some sort, just not sure if it will be an acceptable one or "this feels like a waste" if you know what I mean.

You could look at Intel.

 

[jigger]

Then I'd do it. A 5060 Ti will get you onto the newer feature set to play those games and when it can give you it (CPU permitting), it'll be a large performance upgrade on the existing card.

What motherboard do you have? There have been reports of both Z490 and Z590 boards having issues with 5000 cards.

Some of the new Nvidia feature sets (nothing actually new) palm off extra work to the CPU.

 

[Armadillo]

Then I'd do it. A 5060 Ti will get you onto the newer feature set to play those games and when it can give you it (CPU permitting), it'll be a large performance upgrade on the existing card.

What motherboard do you have? There have been reports of both Z490 and Z590 boards having issues with 5000 cards.

B560 Torpedo. https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/MAG-B560-TORPEDO. It's pretty much the same as the tomahawk just with dual ethernet instead of wifi and ethernet. Not working on my gen board is a little concerning, hopefully it would be ok. Feels like the pc market has just decided to screw me over as soon as I'm finally ready to start upgrading .

You could look at Intel.

I thought intel had really high overhead + not sure about the indie games. I've seen issues with AAA on Intel, they do fix them. Can't say I'm filled with confidence that the same would happen if it was an indie that has 300 people max playing it.

 

[Tetras]

B560 Torpedo. https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/MAG-B560-TORPEDO. It's pretty much the same as the tomahawk just with dual ethernet instead of wifi and ethernet.

I could find an entry on a benchmarking site for a 5090 (Gigabyte) with the B560 Torpedo (BIOS date: 20240708).

For the Tomahawk, there was this with a Zotac Solid OC 5070 (BIOS date: 20210909) and this with a 5080, identifying as "Zotac" (BIOS date: 20210618).

 

[Armadillo]

I could find an entry on a benchmarking site for a 5090 (Gigabyte) with the B560 Torpedo (BIOS date: 20240708).

For the Tomahawk, there was this with a Zotac Solid OC 5070 (BIOS date: 20210909) and this with a 5080, identifying as "Zotac" (BIOS date: 20210618).

Thanks.

Still on release bios here (not broken, so haven't touched), but a quick bios update is no worries if I need to. Little bit more looking around, same guy that had doom has Indiana Jones running.

youtube.com/watch?v=-Bzbyivb1zs

Always above 60, 3060ti seems to be mostly reasonably loaded. That's with power limits on I assume (doesn't say, but is a B560M H V2, that has no vrm cooling at all, so it's either power limits or throttling), no info on gear1/2. From the techpowerup charts, there is quite a big difference between on/off and gear1/2, also my ram is dual rank, so I think I should squeeze slightly more power out of it, than they are (I don't know why, just read dual rank is better).

So if it can generally feed a 3060ti, it seems like my worst case would be 3060ti (which is still double my current card) performance + being able to run RT only games.

That doesn't seem too bad. Still gotta think about it in general (stupid brain doesn't give me peace, always second guessing myself), but seems like it would be reasonable enough pairing until ram prices come back down.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

If you are getting a new card I would do it sooner rather than later as RAM prices are rising.

Also, you could always get a Core i5 12600K and use it on a DDR4 motherboard.

 

[Armadillo]

Alright, figured I'd update this to give the thread closure, after stepping back from this for a week and really thinking about it, and do I need it or is it fomo because prices are climbing. I've decided not to bother.

Multiple reasons really.
1) The few games I want to play, but can't, run fine on the ps5. So I am just going to play them there. They are single player anyway, so stuff like online being paywalled makes no difference.
2) Looking at my wishlist on Steam and upcoming games, next year it's really only Wolverine (if it makes 2026), and the new resident evil I want, that I can't run. Everything else on my wishlist is indie games that I can run. Ps5 has the new resident evil covered and wolverine is 1 year exclusive anyway.
3)My brain just can't settle potentially more often than not, leaving 20-30% if not more on the table after spending £400. It's been gnawing at my brain for the past week, could I live with it, even if playable, or would it sit there gnawing away. This is not logical, but yeah, my brain is my brain, it's weird sometimes.
4)Possibly having to update the bios to get the 50 series going. Stupid thought, but this board has no recovery at all, so I kinda don't want to poke the bear, while ram is high in case it all goes wrong. Probably won't happen, might not even need it, but that's where my brain went.

So I think what I will do is just put more money away until zen 6 ish and do a full build. This machine is getting to be a bit of a ship of theseus as well with various bits being swapped over the years, the power supply is 10 years old (good seasonic one, but still 10 years old). Even if prices are still sitting a bit higher when zen 6 comes along, if I'm dropping £1000 on a full new build, then what's an extra couple of hundred on top of that over the months. Not ideal, but not the end of the world if you are already spending that sort of money.

Will it come back to bite me, maybe, but I have members market, so worse case I'll just sling a used 3060ti in there.

Thanks for the feedback anyway .

 

[jigger]

Just drop in a 7600xt and the 11400 system is at maximum gaming potential.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

You can get a Core i5 12400F and a MSI B760 GAMING PLUS WIFI DDR4 for £200ish and re-use your DDR4. A Corsair RM650e can be bought for around £60. Then sell your old CPU and motherboard.

For under £700 with an RTX5060TI 16GB,you will be good to go for a few more years. But there were deals for the RTX5070 and RX9070 for around £450 a few weeks ago too.There are rumours of AMD increasing dGPU pricing and Nvidia not helping partners with VRAM sourcing.

The big issue is that the GTX1070TI is old and if it fails,you might end up stumping up a lot of money for a replacement anyway.

 

[Armadillo]

I didn't really think of that of that. My 1070ti is 7 and a bit years old. It has been my experience (and I'm probably tempting fate here) that cards tend to go pop early in their life or just truck on forever, but I didn't actually think of it from that angle. Used 2060 super/3050/3060 are in a similar ballpark and I can't see them spiking if the worse happened (too old for most people), but it is a thought to be had.

I also did not realise 12 gen and looking even 13 can use ddr4 either. (Sorry missed the post earlier saying it). That's a thought as well. I am still a little worried about potentially having to update bios, I've done it before, but always on boards with some sort of recovery. This board having none does give me pause.

Honestly never had such decision paralysis before, path forward has normally been clear. It's definitely given me a little more to think about. I did actually have a card on pre-order, but cancelled to pick the brains of the forum, so if I order again, I need to be 100% on my choice as I can't cancel again (well legally I can, but I like ordering from here and I don't want to get blocked for messing around too much).

 

[Joxeon]

A gpu upgrade almost always makes sense first as a gamer, even if you see some bottlenecking the performance will still be far better than a GTX1070ti.

 

[~>Dg<~]

heads up depends what games you going to be playing. what many dont know in the next 6 to 12 months the performance jump on pc is going to be massive even at only 1080 res. you going to need atleast a 3070 gtx for that in most big games coming out. some already are that that are out now new. just keep that in mind. no point in doing a upgrade now to semi okay then having to do it again soon. if you on a budget and you suggested a 5060ti just go in the b grade section on overclockers and make a offer on one you probably will get one for like £250 max. most will be like new or new. leave cpu as is for now.

 

[Slugy]

Planning a CPU/system upgrade for next year isn't looking too good for me either.

I have a 11400f with power limits raised, although only 2x8Gb of RAM at 3600 CL16 Gear 2, and went from a 2070 to a 5070 after moving from a 1080p monitor to a 1440p one (and a 2070 isn't ideal, although ok, for VR). The 2070 was just about hanging in at 1080p high settings in heavier games, but the increased resolution was often too much for high settings.

I suspect a 5060ti will be similar at 1080p to a 5070 at 1440p, although DLSS does seem much more useable at 1440p than 1080p - balanced (and maybe performance) at 1440p looks better than quality at 1080p imho.

It is a huge improvement in everything, and I find myself capping framerates in most things, although I do tend to not play many AAA recent games.
There are a few newer games I have that hit a CPU/RAM limit. Hogwarts Legacy is the worst one - high RT is fine in the school but dire in places like the village - this may well be a lack of RAM as much as CPU, runs very well without RT. Cyberpunk sometimes hits a CPU bottleneck but is mostly GPU limited. I suspect that modern CPU heavy games (thanks UE5!) will moderately often have some CPU bottlenecking, although the 2070 would have been a far worse GPU bottleneck at high settings.

In short - I don't regret it at all, if I had a decent set of 32GB DDR4 I'd now be tempted to get a 14400f/14600K and new mobo (you would need a new one to support 12/13/14 series) and call it done for a few years. As it is I'll carry on with the 11400f until sanity returns to DRAM pricing...

If you want to check some benchmarks for modern games then GameGPU.com have a good range of CPUs that they (allegedly) test, including a 10600k which should give a good idea.

Also - well done for making me de-lurk, been reading the forum for years

 

[Armadillo]

heads up depends what games you going to be playing. what many dont know in the next 6 to 12 months the performance jump on pc is going to be massive even at only 1080 res. you going to need atleast a 3070 gtx for that in most big games coming out. some already are that that are out now new. just keep that in mind. no point in doing a upgrade now to semi okay then having to do it again soon. if you on a budget and you suggested a 5060ti just go in the b grade section on overclockers and make a offer on one you probably will get one for like £250 max. most will be like new or new. leave cpu as is for now.

Been out of the AAA game for a while, why is the jump suddenly going to be massive from what stuff like say Indiana jones needs? No new consoles on the horizon, even the ps5 pro is only packing similar to a 5060ti iirc.

5060ti is just where I fell by default here. If I upgrade, it has to be Nvidia (AMD refuse to fix shaders needing to be rebuilt every time you launch on Overwatch & that's my main online game). 8GB seems a bad buy and while I don't think 1080 will need much more than that, cheapest Nvidia card with more than that, is the 5060ti. It just sort of wins by default.

Planning a CPU/system upgrade for next year isn't looking too good for me either.

I have a 11400f with power limits raised, although only 2x8Gb of RAM at 3600 CL16 Gear 2, and went from a 2070 to a 5070 after moving from a 1080p monitor to a 1440p one (and a 2070 isn't ideal, although ok, for VR). The 2070 was just about hanging in at 1080p high settings in heavier games, but the increased resolution was often too much for high settings.

I suspect a 5060ti will be similar at 1080p to a 5070 at 1440p, although DLSS does seem much more useable at 1440p than 1080p - balanced (and maybe performance) at 1440p looks better than quality at 1080p imho.

It is a huge improvement in everything, and I find myself capping framerates in most things, although I do tend to not play many AAA recent games.
There are a few newer games I have that hit a CPU/RAM limit. Hogwarts Legacy is the worst one - high RT is fine in the school but dire in places like the village - this may well be a lack of RAM as much as CPU, runs very well without RT. Cyberpunk sometimes hits a CPU bottleneck but is mostly GPU limited. I suspect that modern CPU heavy games (thanks UE5!) will moderately often have some CPU bottlenecking, although the 2070 would have been a far worse GPU bottleneck at high settings.

In short - I don't regret it at all, if I had a decent set of 32GB DDR4 I'd now be tempted to get a 14400f/14600K and new mobo (you would need a new one to support 12/13/14 series) and call it done for a few years. As it is I'll carry on with the 11400f until sanity returns to DRAM pricing...

If you want to check some benchmarks for modern games then GameGPU.com have a good range of CPUs that they (allegedly) test, including a 10600k which should give a good idea.

Also - well done for making me de-lurk, been reading the forum for years

Thanks, nice to get some feedback from someone with the same cpu.

Yeah, I don't touch too much AAA myself. Most of my gaming is indie games or "AA" games, not because the 1070ti is getting on, but just that tends to be what catches my eye, which is why the 1070ti has stuck around for so long. Few games it's getting a bit long in the tooth for now though, which is why I was considering it.

I don't know whether my ddr4 is considered a decent kit, it's this https://www.overclockers.co.uk/king...-28800c17-3600mhz-dual-channel-my-291-ks.html. Although overclockers have the timings wrong, 3600 profile is CL16-20-20. Dual rank as well (well my set is, don't know if all are). Seemed ok at the time, but I really only got it as it was only £65, so I just thought why not . £65 for 32GB of ram, didn't know how good we had it.

I'll have a look through gamegpu as well. 3070ti is a good enough stand in for older games.

I'm probably over thinking it, but the ram nonsense has really thrown me off track. It always seems to be something recently with pc upgrades. I miss the old times when you could spend as long as you needed thinking about it and buy at your leisure with prices being stable enough or even going down.

 

[~>Dg<~]

Been out of the AAA game for a while, why is the jump suddenly going to be massive from what stuff like say Indiana jones needs? No new consoles on the horizon, even the ps5 pro is only packing similar to a 5060ti iirc.

5060ti is just where I fell by default here. If I upgrade, it has to be Nvidia (AMD refuse to fix shaders needing to be rebuilt every time you launch on Overwatch & that's my main online game). 8GB seems a bad buy and while I don't think 1080 will need much more than that, cheapest Nvidia card with more than that, is the 5060ti. It just sort of wins by default.








Thanks, nice to get some feedback from someone with the same cpu.

Yeah, I don't touch too much AAA myself. Most of my gaming is indie games or "AA" games, not because the 1070ti is getting on, but just that tends to be what catches my eye, which is why the 1070ti has stuck around for so long. Few games it's getting a bit long in the tooth for now though, which is why I was considering it.

I don't know whether my ddr4 is considered a decent kit, it's this https://www.overclockers.co.uk/king...-28800c17-3600mhz-dual-channel-my-291-ks.html. Although overclockers have the timings wrong, 3600 profile is CL16-20-20. Dual rank as well (well my set is, don't know if all are). Seemed ok at the time, but I really only got it as it was only £65, so I just thought why not . £65 for 32GB of ram, didn't know how good we had it.

I'll have a look through gamegpu as well. 3070ti is a good enough stand in for older games.

I'm probably over thinking it, but the ram nonsense has really thrown me off track. It always seems to be something recently with pc upgrades. I miss the old times when you could spend as long as you needed thinking about it and buy at your leisure with prices being stable enough or even going down.

its just that time ! new switch over unreal 5 engines on most games and new consoles coming out this year like the new xbox which will be 1200 and be very powerful. theres already new games out now where like a 3070gtx is required for 1080 this wil be the norm soon.