T3600, best GPU before bottle-necked?
I acquired an old Precision T3600 from work and have finally decided it may be worth trying to upgrade it. It has a 635 watt PSU, 32 GB of RAM and the base Xeon E5-1603. I just bought a used E5-1660 to get the clock speed up, which will be an improvement no matter what else I do. Now I'm wondering about the GPU.
I've been eyeing the GTX 1660 Super due to its strong performance for its relatively low price (~$250). However, I'd like to get the most I can out of the GPU for a bit of future-proofing. The major limitation is going to be the CPU. The T3600 build guide says to expect some "strong" bottle-necking once you get to an RTX 2080. How much bottle-necking would be expected from the RTX 2060 Super? Will it be enough to offset any increase in performance? For example, why spend 50% more for a GPU if it's severely bottle-necked and only results in a few more frames?
While the system was free, I'm still not looking to break the bank on a PC that's seven years old. I think $400 will have to be the limit since I still need to set aside some money for an NVMe SSD. I don't know if or when I'll commit to a new build. I don't want to over-spend on a GPU now when I can't benefit from its performance, then it be out-dated by the time I do build a new system.
It's also bad timing since Ampere and RDNA 2/Big Navi are coming soon and expected to shake up prices and performance. Is it worth waiting to see what's revealed about those cards, or is it likely I won't be able to benefit from the improved performance? I'm not in a rush, and don't want to waste money on a GPU that's about to be superseded. But if they drop the prices enough on the current generation, it may be worth the wait to reap the savings, especially if I can't use the newer cards.
Thanks!
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cowboy_wilhelm I've had good results installing these gpu's in to T3600 Workstations:
EVGA NVIDIA GTX1660 Ti 6GB Graphics Card***
EVGA NVIDIA RTX 2060 6GB Graphics Card
EVGA NVIDIA RTX 2060 Super 8GB Graphics Card
EVGA NVIDIA RTX 2070 8GB Graphics Card
EVGA NVIDIA RTX 2070 Super Graphics Card
The best value for the T3600 is probably the GTX 1660 TI.
What games do you play?