How CPU-limited am I with an i5-2500k @ 4Ghz?

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AmongTheChosenX

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Older rig, its a Biostar Z77 board with an i5-2500k OC'd to 4ghz with a basic aftermarket Cooler Master 120mm fan cooler.

Lets say I put a GTX960 in this puppy... How CPU-limited am I with Fortnite. Rocket League, etc?
 
I think you should be okay... a GTX 960 is comparable to a GTX 770 or GTX 680... I think when the 2500k came out the GTX 680s were top of the line.
 
you could probably go up another level to the 1050Ti or 1060 if you wanted and still be ok. Might be slightly CPU limited depending on your resolution, but you'll still have better framerates with a slightly newer card.
 
That's what I thought. I'm running a Radeon 7850 that is pretty worthless at this point. Good chance I'll be able to acquire a GTX960 at a solid deal (very cheap), just wanted to see if I should consider upgrading the rest of the rig but honestly I don't think it needs it at this point.
 
AmongTheChosenX said:
Older rig, its a Biostar Z77 board with an i5-2500k OC'd to 4ghz with a basic aftermarket Cooler Master 120mm fan cooler.

Lets say I put a GTX960 in this puppy... How CPU-limited am I with Fortnite. Rocket League, etc?
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You should be fine in those 2 games with that combo. I went from a 1200/6350 GTX 670 2GB, to a 1454/7900 GTX 960 4GB. The 670 tends to be faster in some things but struggles due to having only 2GB of VRAM, so they both are about equal in performance. Make sure you OC the VRAM as high as you can since the 960 is rather limited by it's 128bit bus.

Either way, the 960 will walk all over your 7850 and even more so OC'ed. Also I would OC that 2500K to at least 4.4GHz. Should be doable with that chip and cooler.
I don't think you will see a bottleneck @ 4GHz unless your shooting for 120FPS. Now other games that are more thread intensive might hurt you some do to the fact of only having 4 threads to play with. With my rig in sig, the 960 is actually bottlenecking my 2600K @ 1080p/120Hz. ;)
 
The 960 wasn't bottlenecked by my old i5-750, so you'll be fine ;)
 
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I use a vega 56 with a stock 2600K. Been fine for me. I play at 1440p in Rocket league.
 
What's your budget? Get the baddest GPU you can within your budget and you'll be happy.

I've got a 1080 with a 2500k @ 4.3. Yeah, I'm CPU limited in some games. And? I spent 450. There's no other way I could have spent the same money to get this much performance.
 
Honestly, I'd look into a 2600k in the F/S section.

Those extra threads really help these days.

I've got one en-route for $73 shipped.

EDIT: Also OP, overclock your 960. Here's a quick n dirty OC: max out the power limit, set the clock speed to 1450 and the RAM to 7800. (if you have issues, downclock the RAM to 7700)
 
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I've got a friend with a 4690k at 4.2 and he's holding back his 580 8gb very much.
 
For what it’s worth


4770K @ 4.2ghz for 4 years solid now, flawless in combination with my 1080Ti @ 1440p
 
horrorshow said:
Honestly, I'd look into a 2600k in the F/S section.

Those extra threads really help these days.

I've got one en-route for $73 shipped.

EDIT: Also OP, overclock your 960. Here's a quick n dirty OC: max out the power limit, set the clock speed to 1450 and the RAM to 7800. (if you have issues, downclock the RAM to 7700)
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it's true. I went from i5 to i7 and after years of believing hyperthreading/more threads vs cores doesn't matter I was surprised how much less stutter there is.
 
horrorshow said:
I have a friend in CO with a vanilla 4690 and a 1080 Ti....

I COULD NOT convince him otherwise. smdh
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Ouch holy fuck.
My friend at least understands he's limited. He's even on h97 instead of z97. Made clocking this thing difficult.
 
horrorshow said:
I told him to get a 1070.... I f-in' told him.

(all he plays is PUBG and Starcraft II)
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My friend is trying to play bfv, pubg, and day z.
Day z runs fine but i doubt those devs have decent multi threading.
Pubg is a mess. 60fps and then random stutter as the CPU gets overloaded.
Bfv runs better than expected in dx12 mode but still has some stutter.
I actually had to downgrade the bios to the asrock h97 over clocking bios just to get him to that level of playability.
 
Still using Sandy Bridge EP. My 3970X is currently at 4.4Ghz and everything works fantastic. Games like Battlefield really like the extra cores and threads though.
 
So now I may have an opportunity to get two of these cards for next to nothing...

Only problem now is my motherboard doesn't support SLi... Biostart TZ77A.

Do I try to upgrade the board or do I start looking for a new combo?
 
SLI'ing GTX 960's?

Not worth it.

I'd try and find a used GTX 980 instead.

(I had a GTX 960, and recently upgraded to a 980 Ti.... so trust me)
 
horrorshow said:
SLI'ing GTX 960's?

Not worth it.

I'd try and find a used GTX 980 instead.

(I had a GTX 960, and recently upgraded to a 980 Ti.... so trust me)
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OK so the point I was making here is that the cards are basically crazy cheap
 
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admiralperpetual said:
it's true. I went from i5 to i7 and after years of believing hyperthreading/more threads vs cores doesn't matter I was surprised how much less stutter there is.
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Turning graphics down generally helps much more than throwing more cores at it.
 
entirely based on what softwar you are running

7-zip 100% cpu bottlenecked
AAA gamer in 8k 16xSSAA with 2005DSR not at all

If someone ia answersng you on what is the bottleneck purely based on hardware... they have no clue about what a bottleneck is
 
AmongTheChosenX said:
How CPU-limited am I with Fortnite. Rocket League, etc?
Click to expand...

SvenBent said:
entirely based on what softwar you are running

7-zip 100% cpu bottlenecked
AAA gamer in 8k 16xSSAA with 2005DSR not at all

If someone ia answersng you on what is the bottleneck purely based on hardware... they have no clue about what a bottleneck is
Click to expand...

Seems like he answered that in the OP.
 
At 1080p you’d see a bit of CPU limiting - but only when your playing games on a GPU where you are already at really high frame rates. The difference between 90fps and 140fps only really matters if you are running that high of a refresh rate in the first place.

There would be some newer games where 4 threads would limit you. None of the ones you mentioned would significantly affected though.

You may see min frame time issues at higher resolutions even if you are GPU limited in those cases. With a 960 in there I don’t see you really running 2k/4K anyway.
 
Instead of starting a new thread or resurrecting the Kaby Lake vs Sandy Bridge one from over a year ago, I figured I'd glom onto this one...

Long story short, I'm still running a 2600K @4.4 on a Z77 MB w/16g of 1600mhz ram and a GTX1070 while gaming at 3440x1440. It's still pretty damn good imo. I do not play FPS's anymore so a really high FPS is not important. These days my main genre are strategy, management & commerce/city building type games. My current top three most played being XCOM2, Motorsports Manager & Transport Fever for example. Honestly, those first two mentioned perform absolutely fine on my system as is, it's only TF that gets bogged down a bit when things get really built out in the game.

I was somewhat hopeful that the 417.71 driver would be a game changer in allowing me to finally use Freesync on my monitor. It does work but my sync range is only 35-75fps (default was 48-75 but CRU allowed me to lower it some) and this game still regularly gets down into the 20's & teens.

I would love to get it to that 35 if possible. This is why I want some advice.

My understanding is that this game (or these types of games) are far more CPU dependent vs the GPU and that my normal reflex of just buying an RTX2080 would really not give me a noticeable improvement and that I really need to change my CPU. Then I read the Kaby v Sandy article here, granted over year old now, and now I'm not so sure.
So if you were in my shoes, what would be the most efficient way of helping performance in that game (if any). CPU or GPU? Would upgrading to 2133 memory make a difference or even doubling it to 32gb? (wishful thinking surely but hell, the least painful upgrade budget wise)

Much thanks for all opinions!
 
Reynard11 said:
Instead of starting a new thread or resurrecting the Kaby Lake vs Sandy Bridge one from over a year ago, I figured I'd glom onto this one...


So if you were in my shoes, what would be the most efficient way of helping performance in that game (if any). CPU or GPU? Would upgrading to 2133 memory make a difference or even doubling it to 32gb? (wishful thinking surely but hell, the least painful upgrade budget wise)

Much thanks for all opinions!
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If you want to find the best upgrade for that game I would look on the games forum to find out in advance how to get higher framerate. You need to find out if you need more cores or higher IPC/ Clockspeed. Or maybe more ram better graphics card etc.

I just had a quick look and it sounds like the game is singlethreaded mainly and need high IPC and clockspeed.

An easy way to tell if a graphics card upgrade would increase framerate is to lower the games resolution and graphics detail level to low. If the framerate improves then a new graphics card would help.
 
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Hey I appreciate the reply but you know, I never should have wasted the space. :eek: I'm smarter then this. I know how to check and see what resources are being used in game etc. It's just that ever since I've been building my own pc's, [HARD]OCP has always been my #1 resource fro reviews and info. I only read this info when I'm thinking about making an upgrade as the rest of time I'm blissfully ignorant of the current state of pc tech. I had just read that Sandy/Kaby comparison and just jumped to making the post.

There was a final patch for TF months ago that actually allows it to run on multi cores now and it does on my system just fine but none of my memory (sys or vram) ever gets close to maxing out. I did even try running the game @ 1080p to see if that improved things much before making that post (it barely made a diff.) and yes, ultimately a better CPU is likely to give the most improvement. But I just don't want to spend that much to see if a (hopefully) 20% gain will up the FPS enough to really make a noticeable difference to me. Something else I didn't mention, with all these games I like playing, I have tons of mods running in them and of course that doesn't help my cause much . D'oh!

So yeah, I know better and again sorry to waste the space here, again. ;) I prolly will try a 1080TI at some point if I can find a decent one for $500 but otherwise will sit pat for the time being.
 
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