Hitting the bottle...

[PalmCityBlues]

Hey guys first post!
I have been coming to this site for years though, for informative and well explained info.
I have an I7 920 and my graphics card is not ever hitting 60-100%. I was wondering if you guys think the I7 might be holding my GPU back? Or if it is time to overclock the chip, which I have never done on new motherboards. I see through the search function that this question has been asked before but I have asked on a few other forums and I get mixed results from users and many of the questions asked on this forum are concerning different specs and parts. Many tell me that the HD7950 would never bottleneck the stock 920 but many others say that there is no doubt about the CPU being the cause. Maybe you guys will be able to push me in the right direction. Thanks for your time it means a lot, Ian

Some info in case you need it.
Case: antec 1100
PSU: xfx 1050w Pro
Mobo: asus sabertooth x58
CPU: I7 920 (D0)
Graphics: sapphire hd7950
HDD : ocz solid 3 480gb

 

[Yuriman]

The 920 is pretty low clocked - definitely depends on the game. You can probably get 33% more out of your chip fairly easily.

Alternatively, you could crank up the AA and get that extra eye candy for "free".

 

[BrightCandle]

You will get mixed answers because the answer largely depends on the game. Some games will be CPU bottlenecked, heck they are bottlenecked on my CPU and also peoples Haswell 4770k's that have been overclocked. Equally with a single 7950 you will also find a lot of games are limited by the GPU. How much you experience each will depend very much on the individual games you play.

What I know is that an upgrade to the latest CPU could be worth up to about 50% in the circumstances where the CPU is the issue. But I also know from the gamegpu.ru data that even with a 690 the benefit from a slower to faster CPU is often very marginal, it averages out as something silly like 3% between a 3930k and a 2600k. That is two more cores and one jump in architecture and it makes very little difference in practice. But just occasionally there is a game with 70% more performance or one that is 15% slower.

Its really hard to answer, because it completely depends on the games you play, and we don't really have any benchmarks with your hardware combination to compare with. What you can do is find 7950 reviews, run their benchmarks against your rig and see how much difference you find. That at least will give you a route to progress on particular games and answer your own query.

 

[PalmCityBlues]

Thank you for your answers, I was going to try to get 3.5-4ghz OC from this card as D0 920's can hit them stably quite often, but like I said the last motherboard that I overclocked was an old intel 775 and the bios options were very easy. With this board the bios has so many options and are named different that I am a bit wary on where I should start...Other than the Asus manual, which my board did not come with, that is.

 

[AtenRa]

Just OC and see if you get higher fps/gpu usage in your games. You will be able to go to 3.2GHz with default voltage and up to 3.8-4GHz easily with a good Heat-Sink Fan/WC.

 

[PalmCityBlues]

Went ahead and OC'ed the cpu up to 4GHz but could not get it stable in the small amount of time I had. So I brought it down to 3.8GHz and set it to run a few burn tests through the night. GPU workload and FPS was up but another problem may have been the screen, running with a VGA cord. Switched to DVI and many of the more visual issues were gone. Still checking some options but its definitely looking better.