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Is my CPU bottlenecking my GPU?

H

Hellotalkie

Golden Member
I have a Q8300 paired with a 5870. 4gb of generic ram and a couple HDDs.
When I'm playing bad company 2, sometimes it does stutter, I doubt its the 5870.

Anyways, any suggestions on my next move/purchase should be?

Thanks
 
Stock Clocked, I tried overclocking but my motherboard is awful and plus the generic ram doesn't help. Overclocking is out.

and
1920x1080
 
In that case, my answer is: possibly. :awe:

But seriously, you can perform a simple experiment to find out if you are CPU limited. Start up BC2, but turn the resolution and graphics settings all the way down. Then play a game as normal (try not to puke!). If your performance improves, then you are not CPU limited. If your performance doesn't improve, then you are.
 
Well see, I guess that answers my question. I gave my brother my q9300 since I don't that much often till now. He gets constant max 60fps on high 1080p. Only difference between mine and his is, he has 8gb of ram and of course that q9300.

Yet I get around 45 to 50, heck even down to mid 30's under battle. 'sigh' sucks too since 775 are expensive in the market.
 
cr2250 said:
Well see, I guess that answers my question. I gave my brother my q9300 since I don't that much often till now. He gets constant max 60fps on high 1080p. Only difference between mine and his is, he has 8gb of ram and of course that q9300.

Yet I get around 45 to 50, heck even down to mid 30's under battle. 'sigh' sucks too since 775 are expensive in the market.
Click to expand...

That seems kinda odd. The Q9300 and Q8300 are almost identical except for the L2 cache size. That alone can't cause the framerates to be that significantly different (or can it?).
 
i like to think of the 4mb quads as two pentium dual cores on the same package. the q8300 is a bit weak because of its low 7.5 multiplier and only a 4mb l2 cache. even pushing 450mhz fsb which is pretty far for lga775 only gets you 3375MHz with it.

stock clocked at 2500mhz, you bet that 5870 is being held back by the cpu. just because you are running ddr2 instead of 3 really isnt that much of a performance loss.

if you can find a good deal on a q9550, i would jump on it if you do not want to change platforms. in either case of keeping the q8300 or q9550, i would overclock the piss out of both cpu's.
 
I stole back my q9300. Told him if he wanted a better processor I could find him one but he couldn't tell the difference when i gave him back the old one. How is the q9300 vs the q9550. I found a anandtech member selling one for 185. What i've read online though is there isn't much of a performance difference and I should stay where im at with my q9300. I have it clocked at 2.83ghz but haven't tried any higher.
 
Good deal on the memory! And to answer the cache question, L2 has a pretty decent effect on gaming performance.

If you aren't able to overclock your CPU even with the new RAM, I would not recommend that you go out and buy a Q9550 for $185. That's Sandy Bridge CPU territory and you'd just need to save up more $100-150 for a motherboard.
 
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