Pc Building Simulator

How This Combo Ranks

The AMD Ryzen 5 3600 and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 combination lands at rank 1502 out of 1769 tested combos in Pc Building Simulator. That places this pairing in the bottom 15% of all tested configurations, a modest standing for a CPU that otherwise sits in the 76th percentile among all processors and a GPU that rests in the 51st percentile among all graphics cards.

The CPU side of this pairing is the stronger contributor. The Ryzen 5 3600 delivers an average benchmark score of 18129, which puts it within 0.1% of the Intel Core i5-11400 (18150) and 0.2% ahead of the AMD Ryzen 5 7535HS (18101). The 3600 also edges out the Ryzen 5 1600 by 0.2% (18158) and the EPYC 9274F by 0.3% (18189). These are razor-thin margins, indicating the 3600 is competitive with its direct peers despite its age. However, the GPU holds this combo back. The GTX 1070's average benchmark score of 12331 trails the NVIDIA Quadro K4200 by 0.7% (12241) and sits 1.3% behind the GTX 880M (12490). Against the GTX 1650 SUPER (12504), the 1070 is 1.4% slower, and versus the Tesla K20Xm (12547), it is 1.7% behind.

The rank of 1502 reflects the reality that this GPU is the bottleneck in Pc Building Simulator. The simulation genre typically demands consistent frame pacing more than raw peak throughput, and the 1070's mid-pack percentile (51st) means it is neither a weak nor a strong performer — it is simply average. The combination's low overall rank suggests that many other CPU+GPU pairings in the database extract more from this game, likely because the 1070's Pascal architecture lacks the efficiency of newer designs. Still, the 3600's 12 threads and 32 MB of shared L3 cache provide a solid foundation, and the data shows this combo is capable of playable frame rates at most settings, just not at the top tier.

Settings Recommendations

The measured FPS rows reveal a clear sweet spot for this combo: Medium settings at 2560x1440. At that resolution and preset, the average frame rate is 80.9 FPS, which is comfortably above the 60 FPS threshold for smooth gameplay. The jump from Medium to High at 1440p costs 22.4 FPS (dropping to 58.5), which pushes the experience below that 60 FPS target. At 1080p, the story is similar but with more headroom. Medium at 1920x1080 delivers 133.1 FPS, while High still manages 91.3 FPS. Ultra at 1080p yields 85.6 FPS, which is playable but represents a significant step down from Medium.

For the best balance of visual fidelity and performance, the data suggests Medium at 1440p or High at 1080p. Both options keep frame rates above 80 FPS, and the difference between them is a matter of resolution preference. If the user prioritizes resolution over detail, Medium at 1440p is the better choice. If they prioritize detail over resolution, High at 1080p offers a 10.4 FPS advantage over the 1440p Medium setting. Low settings are unnecessary at either resolution — even at 4K, Low produces 60 FPS exactly, but the visual degradation is likely not worth the frame rate gain when 1440p Medium is available. Ultra is the only preset that consistently underperforms, with 53.5 FPS at 1440p and 28 FPS at 4K, making it the least recommended option.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate scaling from 1080p to 4K shows a predictable pattern, but the magnitude varies significantly by settings preset. At Low settings, the combo delivers 182.3 FPS at 1080p, drops to 118.2 FPS at 1440p (a 35.2% reduction), and lands at 60 FPS at 4K (a 67.1% reduction from 1080p). This steep drop-off indicates that even at Low settings, the GPU is the limiting factor — the 1070's 256.3 GB/s memory bandwidth and 6.463 TFLOPS of FP32 compute cannot sustain higher frame rates as pixel count increases.

At High settings, the scaling is more moderate in percentage terms but still significant. The 91.3 FPS at 1080p falls to 58.5 FPS at 1440p (a 35.9% drop) and then to 30.9 FPS at 4K (a 66.2% drop from 1080p). The 4K High result of 30.9 FPS is barely playable, and the pattern suggests that the 1070's 8 GB of GDDR5 memory is not the constraint — rather, it is the compute throughput that struggles with the higher resolution. The transition from 1440p to 4K at High settings costs 27.6 FPS, which is nearly identical to the 27.1 FPS loss from 1080p to 1440p, indicating a roughly linear scaling penalty.

The data clearly points to the GPU as the limiting component in this pairing. The Ryzen 5 3600's 6 cores and 12 threads are unlikely to be the bottleneck in a simulation game at these resolutions, especially given that the CPU's benchmark scores are competitive with newer parts. The 1070's 51st percentile ranking among GPUs, combined with the steep FPS drops at higher resolutions, confirms that any attempt to push beyond 1440p will be constrained by the graphics card.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the combo delivers its strongest results. Low settings produce 182.3 FPS, Medium yields 133.1 FPS, High drops to 91.3 FPS, and Ultra bottoms out at 85.6 FPS. The gap between High and Ultra is only 5.7 FPS, which is surprisingly small — this suggests that Ultra's additional effects tax the GPU minimally at 1080p, and users seeking maximum detail can enable Ultra without a major frame rate penalty.

Moving to 2560x1440, the performance curve steepens. Low settings still produce a smooth 118.2 FPS, but Medium falls to 80.9 FPS, High to 58.5 FPS, and Ultra to 53.5 FPS. The difference between High and Ultra narrows further to 5.0 FPS, reinforcing the pattern seen at 1080p. However, the step from Medium to High costs 22.4 FPS, which is the largest single-setting drop at this resolution. This indicates that High introduces significant visual workloads that the 1070 struggles to process at 1440p.

At 3840x2160, the results are marginal. Low settings manage exactly 60 FPS, Medium drops to 45.8 FPS, High falls to 30.9 FPS, and Ultra bottoms out at 28 FPS. The 4K results show that this combo is only viable at Low settings for a 60 FPS experience. The gap between Medium and High at 4K is 14.9 FPS, which is proportionally larger than at lower resolutions, confirming that the GPU's compute resources are saturated. Ultra at 4K is effectively unplayable, and even High at 4K is below the 30 FPS threshold that many consider the minimum for interactive gameplay.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 plays the decisive role in this combo's performance. The card's 8 GB of GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit bus provides 256.3 GB/s of bandwidth, which is sufficient for the textures used in Pc Building Simulator at 1080p and 1440p. However, the 1070's base clock of 1506 MHz and boost clock of 1683 MHz are modest by modern standards, and the 1920 shading units operating at those clocks yield 6.463 TFLOPS of FP32 compute. That compute figure is the primary constraint in this game, as the simulation's rendering workload scales directly with resolution.

The GPU's benchmark results reinforce this analysis. The 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 score of 1082 is low compared to the card's overall average of 12331, indicating that the Pascal architecture is not optimized for modern DirectX 12 workloads. The passmark DirectX 12 score of 48 is particularly weak, while the DirectX 11 score of 100 is stronger — this suggests the 1070 performs better in legacy APIs, which aligns with Pc Building Simulator's 2019 release and likely usage of DirectX 11. The Geekbench Vulkan score of 47395 and OpenCL score of 47490 are more respectable, but neither translates to a direct advantage in this game.

The 1070's 150 W TDP and dual-slot design are typical for the GeForce 10-series, and the card's 16 nm process node from TSMC is an older manufacturing technology. The 7,200 million transistors on a 314 mm² die give a transistor density of 22.9M per mm², which is low compared to newer GPUs but does not directly impact game performance. The 64 ROPs and 120 TMUs provide a texture rate of 202.0 GTexel/s and a pixel rate of 107.7 GPixel/s, both of which are adequate for 1080p but become strained at 4K. The data shows that the GTX 1070, while a capable card in its era, is the limiting factor in this pairing, and the Ryzen 5 3600's strong CPU performance cannot compensate for the GPU's mid-pack ranking in the benchmark database.