Question What's holding me back?

[Thorstwin]

I am looking for some insight on a confusing issue that I am having. My current system build is the slightly aging:
I5-2500K (Not Overclocked)
Asus P8P67 Motherboard
12 GB Ram and until recently a GTX 1060 3GB video card.

A friend of mine upgraded his video card to a GTX 2080 and made me a great deal on his old GTX 1070ti. I bought it and installed it and then started re-running any games that had internal benchmarks. (Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Far Cry 5) In most cases I am seeing just a few frames per second improvement with the 1070ti. I expected a much bigger jump in performance.

Is it my processor that is holding me back at this point? I am planning to build a new system once AMD announces their 3rd gen Ryzen chips and I can then make an educated decision between those and the new Intel chips, but I thought this would be a good stop gap in the meantime and I am just a little stumped as to these results.

Any thoughts or insights would be appreciated.

 

[fastamdman]

Not overclocking is holding you back, 12gb of ram is holding you back, not running dual channel is holding you back. What kind of FPS are you seeing, the 1070ti is a very solid card.

 

[ozzy702]

Not overclocking is holding you back, 12gb of ram is holding you back, not running dual channel is holding you back. What kind of FPS are you seeing, the 1070ti is a very solid card.

All this. Only having four threads is also holding you back. Even the 2600k is showing it's age and it's a LOT faster in modern games than a 2500k. You're bottlenecking your GPU. Shoot, even the 9600k has issues in FC5 so yeah, your eight year old CPU isn't going to cut it.

 

[ElFenix]

Not overclocking is holding you back, 12gb of ram is holding you back, not running dual channel is holding you back. What kind of FPS are you seeing, the 1070ti is a very solid card.

what's not running dual channel?

the 2500k is the holdup here. you could overclock for more performance. you're not going to be near matching 7/8/9700k speeds. but it's free. lack of hyperthreading is hurting the tomb raider score, but FC5 only cares if you have 4 cores+ or not.

 

[ozzy702]

what's not running dual channel?

the 2500k is the holdup here. you could overclock for more performance. you're not going to be near matching 7/8/9700k speeds. but it's free. lack of hyperthreading is hurting the tomb raider score, but FC5 only cares if you have 4 cores+ or not.

If he's running 3 sticks he isn't running dual channel. We don't know what he's running though.

 

[DontMessWithJohan]

The I5-2500K is good but it isn't on the level of 1070ti, not even close, so let's go with that. Would also be curious to know exactly what kind of RAM you're running.

 

[BurnItDwn]

Hmm, I thought maybe 12gb could be due to triple channel setup, but none of the LGA1155 boards ever supported running the memory in 3 channel mode. Using 2 matched sticks of ram vs whatever blend is in there now would help with memory bandwidth which could help with framerates.

I believe most likely the CPU itself is the primary bottleneck. I do not think memory bandwidth is the key problem.
Using a matched pair of high end DDR3 2100 sticks might gain a handful of frames, but, I doubt the RAM will make much of a difference with a dedicated GPU. (note: obviously, this ONLY applies with a dedicated discrete GPU, integrated GPUs of course are memory bandwidth constrained!)

Hard to find many relevant reviews, but, this one with an i5-3570 on a Z77 board does a good job comparing differences between single channel and dual channel RAM modes.
https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/1349-ram-how-dual-channel-works-vs-single-channel


Seems like the cheapest option is to try for an overclock, which should help quite a bit, (even with stock cooling)
One could replace the 2500k with something like an ivy bridge 3770k, but, those are still expensive, and generally not worth the price for a measly 5-10% performance gain. Anything newer than Ivy bridge likely won't work on the motherboard.

I've got a 2400 in 1 box, a 4690k in other box, and then a Ryzen 2200G in the PC I built for the wife. The 4690k at stock speeds runs most things well, but, struggles a bit in Kingdom Come Deliverance (it's in a tiny little tower so I run it at stock speed to minimize heat.)

 

[ElFenix]

If he's running 3 sticks he isn't running dual channel. We don't know what he's running though.

intel has supported assymetric dual channel (they call it "flex") mode since 2004. the first 8 gigs is running in dual channel, and since 8 gigs of memory barely holds things back, addressing that is probably behind other issues (namely, the old 4/4 processor).

but OP is fixing that whenever he gets a new platform in a couple months.

 

[ozzy702]

intel has supported assymetric dual channel (they call it "flex") mode since 2004. the first 8 gigs is running in dual channel, and since 8 gigs of memory barely holds things back, addressing that is probably behind other issues (namely, the old 4/4 processor).

but OP is fixing that whenever he gets a new platform in a couple months.

It does have an impact and is slower than just 8GB in most situations. Hardware unboxed just did a video that covered this and other memory related questions. Mind you, the difference would be even more pronounced at 1080p than in the 1440p examples he used.

Agreed that OP needs a new platform, but he asked what's holding him back, and yes, his memory config is one of the many things holding him back. 16GB is the standard for new games.

 

[Headfoot]

Full platform upgrade is probably the way to go here. You could overclock pretty quick to 4.4-4.8ghz depending on your chip to get a little taste of what it would be like.

 

[tarmc]

instead a full platform upgrade would an ivy bridge xeon be a decent option?

 

[fastamdman]

instead a full platform upgrade would an ivy bridge xeon be a decent option?

No. If you are going to swap processors and spend the money on something, spend it "correctly" and do it right the first time. Making a very small upgrade or side grade is never worth it in my opinion. It's much better to drop the cash upfront and get whats needed the first time. You can get used 8700k's pretty cheap if you look around.

 

[ozzy702]

instead a full platform upgrade would an ivy bridge xeon be a decent option?

Nope. Sell the current setup and put the money towards something modern. Motherboards die and that's an eight year old mobo, don't throw good money into a dying platform. If OP can hold out until Ryzen2 I'm sure there will be some solid offerings.

 

[fastamdman]

Nope. Sell the current setup and put the money towards something modern. Motherboards die and that's an eight year old mobo, don't throw good money into a dying platform. If OP can hold out until Ryzen2 I'm sure there will be some solid offerings.

Motherboards can die, but from personal experience I haven't had one fail from normal wear and tare. Now if you spill something on it, thats different. But hell, I still have an abit nf7-s that still runs just fine. I even have an older slot A mobo that works as well. Age shouldn't be to big of a fear.

But we all agree that throwing money at an outdated platform is a horrible idea. Upgrade lol.

 

[tarmc]

depending on cost, i would have figured an 1155 xeon would have been a good option until building new. while it may seem like a side grade, the slightly newer cpu and added threads may be a good option for what hes using it for. might be old but can still be relevant, even if he does have to overclock a bit.

 

[fastamdman]

Considering the op has a 2500K and isn't overclocking it, I doubt he would overclock a xeon.

 

[tarmc]

the option is there though, might make a big difference. personally i swapped an i7 920 for a x5650, its still being using daily for gaming and a few other things. in alot of benchmarks it keeps up with my 4790. will have to see how well fc5 runs on it

 

[fastamdman]

There are tons of options out there, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea lol.

 

[Ketchup]

I don't know what cooler the OP has, but I know with my 212 Evo I was able to get my 2500k to 3.7 GHz pretty easily. I would at least play with overclocked performance before I giving up on the CPU.

 

[BurnItDwn]

Sometimes cheap upgrades are worth it.
I once upgraded a 1.8ghz celeron to a 2.5ghz p-iv for $9.
I went from 384mb of ECC DDR1 ram to 4GB of ECC DDR1 ram for like $25.

It went from being serviceable as an a small dedicated lan server or file server for 90s era games to being serviceable as a 00s era gaming dedicated server.

But, In this case, there is no $10 or $20 huge upgrade. Overclocking is free and will do a lot more than any $10 or $20 CPU In this case.

 

[DominionSeraph]

Does nobody here know that 2GB sticks of DDR3 exist, and that 2x4GB + 2x2GB is a very standard configuration?

 

[BurnItDwn]

Does nobody here know that 2GB sticks of DDR3 exist, and that 2x4GB + 2x2GB is a very standard configuration?

I think most of us may have forgotten that, but, now that you are sending a reminder

 

[Headfoot]

switching to an Ivy Bridge Xeon is a bad idea. It was fine the last time you did it because you could still overclock with Bclk. You need an unlocked processor to overclock from Sandy Bridge on and you lose that with Xeons. Either overclock what you have or do a full platform upgrade, nothing else makes sense

 

[tarmc]

Either way. The extra threads and ipc boost would be helpful and alot cheaper than a complete platform switch. My x5650 @ 3.2 with a rx 480 8gb runs fc5 1080 ultra benchmark avg 70 fps. Nothing insane but def playable

 

[DrMrLordX]

the option is there though, might make a big difference. personally i swapped an i7 920 for a x5650, its still being using daily for gaming and a few other things. in alot of benchmarks it keeps up with my 4790. will have to see how well fc5 runs on it

Difference between going from a 920 to an old-school Westmere Xeon is that you can overclock that Xeon! An Ivy Bridge-gen Xeon is mostly non-overclockable. If he's gonna upgrade to anything, get a 2600k and OC the hell out of it. Or it's time to scoop up someone's used 4790k system.

Does nobody here know that 2GB sticks of DDR3 exist, and that 2x4GB + 2x2GB is a very standard configuration?

I know that they exist. I still have 2x2GB Pi Blacks sitting around here somewhere . . . damn that was some good memory. DDR3-1600 CAS6 on an AMD system was pretty fun.