Solved Will a Ryzen 5 1600 bottleneck a RX 6600?

[Nipah]

Hello, first of all i'm sorry if this is posted in the wrong place. I do apologise, but i am 90% certainly this is where i would post this question?

Secondly - I'm thinking of upgrading to an RX 6600 Graphics Card (Non-XT version) since prices for those have been dropping lately. Unfortunately i have a bit of an older system, a 2017 budget CPU Ryzen 5 1600 is what i have and i wanted to hypothetically know if i could save a buck by keeping it and prolong it's lifespan under the RX 6600. I checked and went on both cpugent's and pc-build's bottleneck calculator and got very different results, one said i would only have 3% bottleneck while the other said i'd have 36% bottleneck.

Need a second (or i guess, third?) opinion here, just your educated guess would be good enough! Thank you.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

I wouldnt have a problem using an RX 6600 with a Ryzen 5 1600. Bottlenecking is relative. A lot of it depends on the game and resolution and many other factors. Ignore those bottleneck calculators, they mean very little.

If you're only playing online MMO's like Battlefield or RTS like Starcraft MP then you wont see as much benefit from a new GPU. If you want to play the newest AAA action games, like God Of War or Elden Ring, I'd expect you to get a lot more out of a new GPU paired with that CPU.

What games do you play, and what resolution and refresh rate is your monitor?

 

[Nipah]

I wouldnt have a problem using an RX 6600 with a Ryzen 5 1600. Bottlenecking is relative. A lot of it depends on the game and resolution and many other factors. Ignore those bottleneck calculators, they mean very little.

If you're only playing online MMO's like Battlefield or RTS like Starcraft MP then you wont see as much benefit from a new GPU. If you want to play the newest AAA action games, like God Of War or Elden Ring, I'd expect you to get a lot more out of a new GPU paired with that CPU.

What games do you play, and what resolution and refresh rate is your monitor?

Thanks for the well-informed and quick response!

To answer your question, i run a 1920x1080 @75hz monitor, and the games i'm sorta looking into running with this new card will be stuff like RE: Village, Metro Exodus, Insurgency Sandstorm, Battlefront 2, RDR2. That sorta thing. These are all games i'v ebeen keen to play but haven't been able due to having an ancient prehistoric card. I did my research and figured the RX 6600 was probably the perfect 1080p 75 fps gpu out there (for the price point) with some potential for 1440p gaming. Of course, i'm open to being corrected.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

Its a nice card, and for the type of games you listed on your monitor it will definitely be an upgrade, especially for RDR2, RE VIII and Metro and similar graphically intensive single player games. But I expect you'll get better frames in the online games as well depending on whats happening in teh game.

Get the card, the CPU will probably be ok for a while yet

 

[Nipah]

Its a nice card, and for the type of games you listed on your monitor it will definitely be an upgrade, especially for RDR2, RE VIII and Metro and similar graphically intensive single player games. But I expect you'll get better frames in the online games as well depending on whats happening in teh game.

Get the card, the CPU will probably be ok for a while yet

Appreciate the help! It's good to have my fears alleviated. Just one of those things i had to ask about before i went and spent $600 on an overpriced GPU from someone who knows a tad more than i do.

Worse case scenario, can always overclock my cpu to squeeze out some extra performance!

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

Its a lot of money, bad time to have to upgrade, I feel for you.

I wouldn't bother overclocking your CPU to be honest unless you find that interesting in itself. A good one can get it up to 3.9-4 GHZ, which is around 10-15% over the base all core frequency. If youre doing it properly (as you should to avoid OS corruption and other problems) it will take you many hours of reading guides and stress testing to get it stable.

In practical terms that means if you're stuck at 30FPS in a situation where youre fully CPU limited and the game youre playing scales FPS perfectly with clock speed, overclocking your chip will get you to 33-35 FPS. And that's not even going to be all of the time.