Will my DDR3 RAM hold back NVIDIA's next-gen Pascal GPU?

I want to upgrade to an NVIDIA Pascal GPU in the near future, will my DDR3 RAM hold me back?

Question by Ronald from United States | Answered by in Video Cards & GPUs on

I have a i7 4790k paired up with an MSI Z97 PC Mate motherboard that only supports DDR3 memory. I plan on upgrading to the Pascal's high-end GFX when it launches, do you think my DDR3 or any other spec will bottle neck the new generation of NVIDIA's GPUs in anyway? Thanks in advance!

Hey Ronald!

This is a good question, and something that's easy to answer: no, no it won't. Buy the next-gen Pascal GPU without any worries.

Will my DDR3 RAM hold back NVIDIA's next-gen Pascal GPU? | TweakTown.com

Done? Yeah, we are - but I'll explain a little. Your system RAM won't hold you back at all, and this would apply to both next-gen AMD and NVIDIA cards. If you had DDR2, then we might have a different answer - but that would be more because of the older CPU and motherboard you'd have, and not the DDR2 RAM itself.

DDR3 won't hold you back, and you have a pretty damn good CPU with your Core i7-4790K, too. You can rest assured, that any Pascal-based GPU from NVIDIA is going to work absolutely fine in your system, without any bottlenecking. The only bottlenecking to speak of, would be from your CPU - but there aren't many games that are CPU bound these days.

Last updated: Nov 3, 2020 at 07:10 pm CST

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