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Is my cpu bottle necking my gpu?

H

hunkeelin

Senior member
my cpu is quite old a phenom II x4 945 3.0ghz no over clock

my gpu is 2x6970 crossfire.

mobo: ud3 990x

ram: Kingston 4GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) x4 (16 gb ram total)

ssd: ocz vertex III max iops

psu: 1000w gold series cooler master silence pro.

my monitor setup is just 1920 x 1080



Anyways the thing i'm concern here is my ram/cpu. Is my ram/cpu bottle necking my other components?

so any suggestions on upgrade? is it the ram? or is it cpu? or is it both?
 
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Yes it is.

Will you notice a difference going to a 2500k? Probably not unless you have to have FRAPS running during your gaming experience.
 
Most definitely but as stated above whether its noticeable or not probably depends on your monitor setup, the individual person and the game.
 
Probably not with gaming unless you are crossfiring/SLI 2 high end cards.


I know you will notice a difference at boot up. It seems to me that Intel boots into windows faster with SSDs.
 
Can either of you explain what it means to have a bottleneck, yet not be able to notice it?

I mean, is it really a bottleneck if you don't notice it?

If you run Starcraft II, you will see stuttering/low frames on big battles, because your CPU is not capable of providing high frame rates on that particular game. You would notice that definitely, and it sucks because your video card is capable of keeping up with higher FPS, so your CPU is limiting you. However, keep in mind that SC2 is a very specific example here, because SC2 kills all CPUs given a big multiplayer battle, so nearly everyone will be CPU limited for that game.

But run a different game, mostly any other game, and you'll find the GPU will get hammered even more than your CPU, so I'd say on average you have a good match but the match could be even better if you overclock the core and CPU-NB of your CPU. Note that in Starcraft2, there is a noticeable increase in performance when you overclock the CPU-NB by itself even if you keep the core speed the same. But overclock both, and it could even things out very nicely. run a visually fancy game and turn up the anti-aliasing and resolution, and you'll find your video card just can't keep up even though your CPU is not hitting 100%.

So it matters, what do you use your computer for? Run a game and use a monitoring program to check the GPU load and the CPU load. See if either one hits 100%. if one of them, say your GPU, is always at 100%, but the other one is always less than 100%, then that's your bottleneck.
 
KingFatty said:
Can either of you explain what it means to have a bottleneck, yet not be able to notice it?

I mean, is it really a bottleneck if you don't notice it?

If you run Starcraft II, you will see stuttering/low frames on big battles, because your CPU is not capable of providing high frame rates on that particular game. You would notice that definitely, and it sucks because your video card is capable of keeping up with higher FPS, so your CPU is limiting you. However, keep in mind that SC2 is a very specific example here, because SC2 kills all CPUs given a big multiplayer battle, so nearly everyone will be CPU limited for that game.

But run a different game, mostly any other game, and you'll find the GPU will get hammered even more than your CPU, so I'd say on average you have a good match but the match could be even better if you overclock the core and CPU-NB of your CPU. Note that in Starcraft2, there is a noticeable increase in performance when you overclock the CPU-NB by itself even if you keep the core speed the same. But overclock both, and it could even things out very nicely. run a visually fancy game and turn up the anti-aliasing and resolution, and you'll find your video card just can't keep up even though your CPU is not hitting 100%.

So it matters, what do you use your computer for? Run a game and use a monitoring program to check the GPU load and the CPU load. See if either one hits 100%. if one of them, say your GPU, is always at 100%, but the other one is always less than 100%, then that's your bottleneck.
Click to expand...

what is the program that check the cpu/gpu load?
 
A single 6970 would be bottlenecked by 3ghz phenom 2.

You are going to need an overclocked intel 2500k to take full advantage of both gpus in modern games.

6970's are great cards and you should be able to enjoy them for many years without feeling the need to upgrade, but your cpu is crap.

Even a stock 2500k will probably bottleneck those gpus occasionally.

If you really want to see those gpus at 100 percent usage, you will probably need to overclock a 2500k to 4.0 or so.

Intel is releasing a new line of processors in 2 months. At that time you may be able to find people selling their old 2500ks for a bargain rate.
 
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hunkeelin said:
what is the program that check the cpu/gpu load?
Click to expand...

Download MSI Afterburner, run your favorite game, and see what your GPU usage is for each GPU. I can promise you that you are badly cpu-bottlenecked. With your CPU, I'd assume most modern games will run your GPUs around 60%. Even I can occasionally be bottlenecked, and my CPU is probably 25% faster and my crossfire setup is 25% slower than yours.
 
Ok.

so what are ur suggestions? gaming is not the only thing i do. i run alot of virtue machine.

should i consider upgrading my ram? (u guys only mentioned about my cpu never about my ram when those are the cheapest 10usd ram u can get out there).

i want a hexacore ivy bridge but it seems it will not come in anytime soon. So what's the suggestions mobo, cpu, ram.
 
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