I have an Intel i7-4770 CPU (from 2013) and I don’t think I have ever been CPU-bound so I would rather not spend money on upgrading it. However, I want to upgrade my graphics card to a Radeon RX 7600. My motherboard supports PCIE 3.0 which the RX 7600 is fine with.
Is there anything I should look out for? I’m worried that I’m missing something that will prevent me from running a 2023 video card on hardware ten years older than that.
(In case anyone is curious, my current video card is a GeForce GTX 960. It has been good enough for Diablo 2 Resurrected but I don’t think it will be able to handle Baldur’s Gate 3.)
You are about to be CPU bound. My old 2700k at 4.3-.8 Ghz is sometimes bottle-necked by an rx480 8Gb. I can still use a beefy card in it for compute though. Looks like that card can saturate your PCI bus at 3 - 4x the throughput your CPU can handle. I would consider this if you had a need right now and you are going to upgrade the rest fairly soon.
What this guy said, welcome to the world of being CPU bound.
That being said, unless you are going for benchmark scores you most likely won’t run into any issues. There are RARE instances that because of the nature of the bottleneck the systems actually operates worse than previously but thus is a vary rare occurrence. You will definitely be not getting the full performance of your GPU though.
If I’m not going to be getting the full performance of that card, should I consider buying an older card instead, if the older card would be just as fast in practice?
(How can I know the effective performance of a video card on my system?)
I have a PC of theseus. My CPU and GPU get swapped out on alternating 3-5 year intervals. I buy the best GPU I can afford KNOWING that in a few years I’m going to be upgrading my CPU. My computer is an eternal bottleneck.
If you just plan on keeping everything as is for as long as possible then getting a less powerful GPU would hurt you at all. It would save you some cash.
No, don’t listen to those who’re so scared of being Bottlenecked™. Unless your upgrade is hilariously lopsided (like buying a RTX 4090 for an Intel Sandy Bridge platform), it’s likely to be the best upgrade per dollar spent.
Do think about your upgrade path in the future, like, are you planning on an entirely new PC soon? The other factor in an upgrade is also the dollar per time value; no point spending $200+ when you’re getting a new PC next year, for example.
I went with a GTX 1070 for an i7 920, that extended that platform for another 3.5 years. Played quite a few games too. Carried the GPU into the new system for another 2 years! Pascal was truly an amazing generation.
No you really should get the best GPU you can afford. Yes you will be bottlenecked, but only on more recent games where game devs are really trying to squeeze what they can out of the latest Xbox and PS5.
CPU upgrades are relatively cheap compared to GPU upgrades as well.