Hey,
What if I put a GT 1030 PCI-E 3.0 x16 in an old motherboard with a PCI-E 1.1 x16 slot? Will there be a huge bottleneck?
If yes, my other option is a GT 730 PCI-E 2.0 x16.
Also, the CPU is a Core 2 Duo E7400 2.80 GHz.
What about the CPU? Is it going to bottleneck the card?
Bottleneck is a funny "animal", that's why I don't like the term. It mainly depends on what you are doing. In some games CPU may be problem in others GPU but even both can be problem. When you throw RAM and disk into the mix you get a quite undefinable entity. Best way to find out is to follow CPU, GPU and RAM usage in a specific game, any of those hitting close to 100% usage while other(s) show low usage is actually a bottleneck. Fire up another game and another component could show a bottleneck.
The GT 1030 GPU is newer by 4 years thus better than the GT 730. Whatever you stick it in to.
Your CPU is 10 years old along with other hardware/interfacing stuff on the MOBO.
Games vary as to the use of CPU relative to GPU and that would vary with settings and so on.
With such an old CPU any game which is CPU intensive is at a greater disadvantage.
In all, impossibly complex scenario apart from the first sentence.
A MOBO 10 years old is near to end of life.
Your cutting it very hard with pairing the GT 1030 with E7400 because the GT 1030 is about the performance between the GTX 750 and the GTX 750 Ti.
No one can answer the bottleneck question until you let us know what you are planning to do with the computer. Given the CPU, I'm going to assume you aren't going to be gaming with this system. If that is the case, you wouldn't need to worry about bottlenecks. The computer would be fine for basic usage.
Quote
