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RX480, 2500K and a gen2 PCI E x16 slot - bottlenecked?

Associate
Joined
6 May 2011
Posts
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Inside the M25
Hi all

Have been searching the forums and various websites, but wanted to tap into the overclockers brain.

I was looking at getting the latest Doom game, and maybe a couple of other modern PC games but think I need a Graphics upgrade to get the best of them as my machine is a few years old (will be playing at 1080p, maybe 2550 if I get a new monitor next year)

The AMD 480s look interesting and in my price range (circa £250) but before I push the button I wanted to check that the rest of my machine won't bottleneck it. I was going to get the 4GB version as 4K gaming is a long way away for me.

I have an overclocked 2500K which has been sitting at a rock solid 4.5GHz since I bought it years ago (incidentally still the best value for money processor I've ever bought). It's plugged into an MSI P67A GD65 motherboard which has a PCI E x16 Gen2 slot. I'm running 2x AMD 6950 graphics cards in SLI at the moment which are getting a little long in the tooth, as well as SLI not really being supported well enough to make enough of a difference.

If the 480 would be overkill and bottlenecked either by the Gen2 slot in the motherboard or the processor (probably not the processor, given how few games multi-thread past 4 cores), then what other upgrade would get me playing the latest Doom, maybe Battlefield 1 or Total War: Warhammer for a sensible price?

Don't fancy upgrading the rest of the machine just yet, especially given I don't edit video etc so the 4 core 2500K is still more than adequate for my usual workloads.
 
There may be a degree of bottleneck but unless a system is perfectly balanced there always will be. The 480 will be a great upgrade in that machine (or a 1060)
 
there is none. the was no difference even on a fury x until i was running pcie 1.0 x8 then it lost about 1/3 of its performance, so even pcie 1.1 x16 and 2.0 x8 should be fine with rx480.
 
You will have absolutely no bottleneck with PCI 2.0 16x and a 480. There has been several tests of the negligible difference there is between PCI 3.0 x16 and 2.0 x16 on this type of card <1%. Same goes with a 2500k at 4.5GHz, just not going to bottleneck a 480, ever. You have go to the top end of current GPUs like the 1080 to start seeing lower minimums/average fps on older gen i5 systems.
 
Just ran this for fun

Pascal Titan Stock
6950X @4.4
Quad channel memory 3200mhz
PCI-E 3.0
H/T enabled
10 cores active

BaS64Qt.jpg



Same again but configured as a 2500k

Pascal Titan Stock
6950X @4.4
Dual channel memory 2400mhz
PCI-E 2.0
H/T Disabled
4 cores active

ZKssEz4.jpg


Very little difference going from PCI-E 3.0 to 2.0
 
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