PCIe 3.0 and 6600k Recommendations

8

86DRIFTER

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 3, 2006
Messages
355
I am due for a little bit of an upgrade. I am currently running an AMD R9 290 in my 6 year old PC. I have the opportunity for a new card. I am willing to spend $200-$400 on a card.

The one bottleneck I am concerned with is PCIe 3.0. I know there were some issues with some newer cards not running well on this standard. I am open to AMD and NVidia cards. I use an ultrawide screen running 2560x1080

Games I would like to play are Sea of Thieves, Trackmania 2020 on high, CoD MWII Warzone.

Another constraint is that I am running a mini-ITX board in an Corsair Obsidian 250D, which has 11.4" of length it can accept.

Thanks in advance!
 
Last edited:
nothing to worry or concern about PCI-E 3.0 even on most modern GPUs, you should be more concerned about your CPU than PCI-E bandwidth, as there is where the major bottleneck will be, so I wont go any higher than RTX 2060/S RTX 3060 levels of performance, so go with any of those.

for reference my daughter's machine still is using a 3700K with an RTX 2060 and there are several games that are CPU bottlenecked at 1080P and the 6600K isn't too much faster than that.
 
I generally leapfrog my upgrades. Mobo/RAM/CPU will come later on.

I'll check out the RTX 3060s.
 
Like Araxie said, the CPU will be holding you back more than the PCI-E generation. I just tested my 5600X machine vs my friends 6700K the other day, at 1080p with a RX 6600 they are the same, but moving up to a 3070ti the gap widens to about 20% in favor of the 5600X, and with a 6900XT the gap goes to almost 40%. 2560x1080 is sort of in between but I would expect the gap to remain since the 6600K is a 4-thread chip.

I would highly suggest something like a 6600XT. Its plenty fast for those games even at 1440p and won't break the bank, plus it can be had in a smaller form and doesn't create a ton of heat.
 
I wouldn't spend any money on a modern card if you're still saddled with a four core four thread CPU. That CPU is not even going to meet minimum requirements for lots of games so even something like a 3060 will run like garbage in many cases due to your CPU being completely pegged at times never mind the horrible 1% lows. You really should have sold off that platform when it was worth more instead of waiting this long but you absolutely need to upgrade that no matter what if you want to play modern games smoothly on a modern video card.

And is that sig correct with only 8 gigs of ram? 16 gigs is the absolute minimum even for an entry level gaming computer at this point and in fact there are three games coming out this year with 32 gigs being recommended. It is way way past time for a platform upgrade.
 
Last edited:
LigTasm said:
Like Araxie said, the CPU will be holding you back more than the PCI-E generation. I just tested my 5600X machine vs my friends 6700K the other day, at 1080p with a RX 6600 they are the same, but moving up to a 3070ti the gap widens to about 20% in favor of the 5600X, and with a 6900XT the gap goes to almost 40%. 2560x1080 is sort of in between but I would expect the gap to remain since the 6600K is a 4-thread chip.

I would highly suggest something like a 6600XT. Its plenty fast for those games even at 1440p and won't break the bank, plus it can be had in a smaller form and doesn't create a ton of heat.
Click to expand...
A 6600xt will run at pcie 3 x8 in his system and that will impact performance in some games. That coupled with his four thread CPU is not going to lead to a smooth experience in lots of games.
 
Because you have been making due with your R290 for so long you actually don't need to go with the latest mid low to mid range cards.
86DRIFTER said:
I generally leapfrog my upgrades. Mobo/RAM/CPU will come later on.

I'll check out the RTX 3060s.
Click to expand...
The 1660 cards from Nvidia and from AMD I imagine RX 5500 and up will give you a decent performance uplift.
 
jobert said:
A 6600xt will run at pcie 3 x8 in his system and that will impact performance in some games. That coupled with his four thread CPU is not going to lead to a smooth experience in lots of games.
Click to expand...

It’s not a big problem, the hardest part is the 4 core chip. My RX6600 was like 50% faster than my friends 1070 even at 3.0 x8. Maybe he could scrounge up a cheap 6700k to help out, I think those are pretty cheap these days. I played some cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p ultra settings and it was actually a pretty good experience.
 
Thanks everybody! An RTX 3060 seems about right for the time being.

For those concerned about the CPU being the bottleneck, I have intentions to upgrade to an AMD 5600X with a new mainboard somewhere down the line. I've come to a conclusion to not buy AAA titles and to keep my gaming a bit more simple. My main goal was to be able to turn on anti-aliasing where I can and maintain performance. Trackmania would benefit greatly from this. The R9 290 (I got from the trash) isn't really cutting it.
 
sure tha's an older CPU, but still ok for many games. i think the question here is what the OP wants to play and how long he wants to keep the GPU.

looks like not much in the way of AAA games, so should be good to go. i only recently upgraded from that same CPU....might have been overclocked pretty hard, but hey who's counting.

sometimes a good strategy is upgrade your gpu this year and then do the rest next year to space out the expense.
 
THRESHIN said:
sure tha's an older CPU, but still ok for many games. i think the question here is what the OP wants to play and how long he wants to keep the GPU.

looks like not much in the way of AAA games, so should be good to go. i only recently upgraded from that same CPU....might have been overclocked pretty hard, but hey who's counting.

sometimes a good strategy is upgrade your gpu this year and then do the rest next year to space out the expense.
Click to expand...

I've made a rule not to buy a AAA title, unless I am absolutely convinced it is worth paying the price. I'm very happy playing older games. I was even looking at recent GPU reviews and I didn't even know what most of them were.

You're right, I'm a leapfrog upgrader. There's sort of a lineage of parts from the machine I have now, to the one in my sig (circa 2015 (I don't log in much anymore)), to the first machine I built in 2007.
 
86DRIFTER said:
Thanks everybody! An RTX 3060 seems about right for the time being.

For those concerned about the CPU being the bottleneck, I have intentions to upgrade to an AMD 5600X with a new mainboard somewhere down the line. I've come to a conclusion to not buy AAA titles and to keep my gaming a bit more simple. My main goal was to be able to turn on anti-aliasing where I can and maintain performance. Trackmania would benefit greatly from this. The R9 290 (I got from the trash) isn't really cutting it.
Click to expand...

For CoD MW II, rx 6600xt is better than rtx 3060:
https://www.techspot.com/review/2561-cod-modern-warfare-2-benchmark/

and for overall performance, based on array of games tested at techpowerup:
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-3060.c3682
rx 6600xt is 12% faster than rtx 3060, and probably cheaper too.
 
There is no telling how those games will perform on those cards with his old 4 thread cpu though. The effective 3.0 8x on the 6600xt could be an issue but at the some time AMD usually performs better with older weaker cpus so who knows.
 
jobert said:
There is no telling how those games will perform on those cards with his old 4 thread cpu though. The effective 3.0 8x on the 6600xt could be an issue but at the some time AMD usually performs better with older weaker cpus so who knows.
Click to expand...
I can testify that my i5 2500k at my sig, while only run default, still can get 90% performance for gtx 1070 (16x 3.0) and almost 95% for rx 6500xt (4x 3.0) compared to my previous platform (2700x @4050mhz for gtx 1070 & i3 12100f for rx 6500xt).
 
Riev90 said:
I can testify that my i5 2500k at my sig, while only run default, still can get 90% performance for gtx 1070 (16x 3.0) and almost 95% for rx 6500xt (4x 3.0) compared to my previous platform (2700x @4050mhz for gtx 1070 & i3 12100f for rx 6500xt).
Click to expand...
I find that hard to believe as even Crysis 3 from way back in 2013 was pegging my oced 2500k at 100% and dropping below 60 fps at times trying to push a now ancient gtx 780. In fact in early 2014 I went with a 4770k as I was becoming cpu limited in some games at that time.
 
jobert said:
I find that hard to believe as even Crysis 3 from way back in 2013 was pegging my 2500k at 100% and dropping below 60 fps at times trying to push a now ancient gtx 780. In fact in early 2014 I went with a 4770k as I was becoming cpu limited in some games at that time.
Click to expand...
Ha, forgot to mention that while running some games (old actually: Battlefield V, DiRT 3) and some new one like Lego Builders, my i5 2500k also pegged at 100% occasionally, but still can maintain the performance figures I posted above.

What I want to say is this, if the OP needs to upgrade his gaming experiences, then upgrading to rx 6600xt or his choice of rtx 3060 will give him more boosts than upgrading his platform right now.
 
86DRIFTER said:
I've made a rule not to buy a AAA title, unless I am absolutely convinced it is worth paying the price. I'm very happy playing older games. I was even looking at recent GPU reviews and I didn't even know what most of them were.

You're right, I'm a leapfrog upgrader. There's sort of a lineage of parts from the machine I have now, to the one in my sig (circa 2015 (I don't log in much anymore)), to the first machine I built in 2007.
Click to expand...
i'm the same way, i just upgraded this past black friday. my last system was a 6600k and a GTX 970 :) served me well for over 7 years. i've kept my 1080p monitors just so i don't have to upgrade for longer.

i bought my first AAA title in years just a couple days ago....dead space remake. looks and runs awesome on my new 6700XT
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top