Will an i3-2120 be a bottle neck for a 7950?

T

TType85

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jul 8, 2001
Messages
1,554
I am putting a upgraded computer for my wife. She does light gaming, mostly WoW and SWTOR. We will probably be getting the new Final Fantasy MMO.

Her current system is:
i3-2120
4GB ram
5770
64gb ssd
1TB hdd,
24" 1200p monitor

It plays the games ok but they need to be turned down a bit to be smooth. I have a Dell 2713 monitor on the way (thanks dell outlet :) ) so I know the 5770 is not going to push her games at a native res on that monitor. I picked up a MSI 7950 3GB card to put in and a 256GB SSD.

New system will be:
i3-2120
8GB ram
7950 3GB
256gb ssd
27" 1440p monitor

My hope is to run her games at native res, pretty much maxxed out. Will she be bottle necked by that CPU?
 
LigTasm said:
Yes. Those are CPU heavy games.
Click to expand...

Eh, I guess i'll throw my spare E3-1230v2 in her machine. She hasn't had an upgrade done to her machine since mid 2011, so this will probably last her at least a few years.
 
TType85 said:
Eh, I guess i'll throw my spare E3-1230v2 in her machine. She hasn't had an upgrade done to her machine since mid 2011, so this will probably last her at least a few years.
Click to expand...

WoW and SWTOR love CPU, a dual core would be fine if you could overclock it a little but I think you'd get more performance with a lesser GPU and more CPU grunt. It would do well with that 1230v2, those have pretty decent clocks out of the box.
 
Single player games for the most part you'll be just fine. Multiplayer could be an issue but it'll definitely be quite the upgrade over the 5770 and at that resolution the 3gb of RAM will get to stretch its legs.

Worse case scenario drop an i5 in there.
 
I watched task manager while running the games at 1080p maxed out and it sat around 40-45% cpu usage on WOW and 60-70% on SWTOR with the i3-2120. I swapped in the E3-1230v2 and it cut those number at least in half.
 
running ff14 at 1440p maxed out, near crystal hubs my 5ghz 2600k can't maintain 60fps due to high player congestion
 
Best thing to do is get the 7950 (good investment right now anyway) and then if it does bottle neck it you can upgrade the cpu.
 
From the i3-2120 to the E3-1230 v2 you are going from 2 cores to 4 cores minus hyper threading so assuming the game can address the additional cores then you should get a nice bump in performance. As far as clock speeds they are both at 3.3 with the additional bump of turbo and the core efficiency from sandy to ivy bridge. Probably not a performance gain of the delta 150$ for the chip but if you have it already go for it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top