Bottlenecking my 980 GTX?

thesmelliestsock.

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Dec 6, 2003
Messages
1,214
Hi all,

I just recently replaced a GTX 680 with a GTX 980 Kingpin. I am wondering if it's possible that I'm bottlenecking the GPU as the performance gains in games that I have been playing haven't been as significant as I would have expected at comparable graphics settings. I'm only running 1080p for reference.

My current specs are as follows:

ASUS P8Z68-V LX Motherboard
Intel i7-2600K Processor w/ Corsair H60 watercooler @ 4.9GHz
8GB (4GBx2) G.SKILL RAM DDR3 1600Mhz
Crucial M4 256GB SSD

I should have plenty of juice as I'm running a high-rated 1200w PSU.

I overclocked the video card to +100Mhz on the core and +250Mhz on the memory.

The ASUS motherboard that I'm using is a PCI-E 2.0 (3.0 ready) but the i7-2600K doesn't support 3.0. I'm not really sure if that makes a big difference in performance.

Do you guys think that I may be bottlenecking the GPU? Are there performance benchmarks that you would recommend running to see if my numbers are falling in-line with comparable builds?

Thanks!
 
The GTX 980 can sometimes be more than double the performance of a GTX 680 at 1920x1080, but it's usually less than double, depending on the game (source). Do you have some specific game benchmarks?
 
In my opinion I think you're running with too much PSU. That system at most is probably only going to pull 50% of its total capacity. The efficiency of power supplies can sometimes fall through the floor the less percentage of their available power that they use. A system like your's could probably do best with a 650-700W PSU since you're overclocking.

But as far as other hardware being a bottleneck? I wouldn't think so. Most video cards don't saturate a full 16 lanes of PCI-E 3.0 yet, and PCI-E 2.0 x16 is the equivalent of PCI-E 3.0 x8. Sandy Bridge is also still one helluva CPU even after all this time.
 
I don't have any to compare to my 680 GTX unfortunately. I mostly play GTA V and have been reading about vsync issues that people are encountering lately... I wonder if that could be my issue because at some point the performance really takes a dump and it feels like the game is running under 30 FPS.
 
I don't have any to compare to my 680 GTX unfortunately. I mostly play GTA V and have been reading about vsync issues that people are encountering lately... I wonder if that could be my issue because at some point the performance really takes a dump and it feels like the game is running under 30 FPS.
Unfortunately like most games released these days it doesn't support Triple Buffering either through the game itself or through forcing it on in the control panel. Your best options are either G-Sync (with a G-Sync display, of course), or Adaptive V-Sync (available to any NVIDIA card in the Manage 3D Option of the CP).

The game also has issues running in a window or borderless windowed fullscreen.
 
Fire up precision x or afterburner, play your games for a bit and then come back and look at your system utilization's.
 
You are not bottlenecking a damn thing. 2600K with that heavy overclock gives any latest Intel CPU a run for its money, especially considering they are not as good overclockers. Also bandwidth in PCIe 2.0 is not yet a problem.
 
Yup, that CPU is trash now, give ya $25 for it.
SkrNmo7.gif
 
I dont see how. Back in December I went from a highly overclocked GTX 670 which was roughly as fast as a GTX 680 to this 290x Lightning and saw a massive increase in frame rates and Im also at 1080. I can play Crysis 3 now fully maxed out with 4x MSAA and still average framerates in the 50's. The 980 is faster than my 290x and your CPU is certainly faster than my 8350 at 4.8 GHz so you should be seeing a shit ton of increase in frame rates. Something else is wrong if youre only getting marginal increases in games.
 
reset all the option settings for all your games, by deleting cfg file or by different methods.

I remember when I went from 290 to 980, all my games thought I still had AMD and ran like crap
.
for bf4 I had to go inside its folder and delete user.cfg and provsafe profile in documents folder, then just run the game and new ones would create.

after that bf4 ran ran fine.

oh and if you're using Win7, you might want to get Win8, these new 900 series favor it a lot more.
 
reset all the option settings for all your games, by deleting cfg file or by different methods.

I remember when I went from 290 to 980, all my games thought I still had AMD and ran like crap
.
for bf4 I had to go inside its folder and delete user.cfg and provsafe profile in documents folder, then just run the game and new ones would create.

after that bf4 ran ran fine.

oh and if you're using Win7, you might want to get Win8, these new 900 series favor it a lot more.

Really win 8 > Win 7 for gfx perf?
 
from what I remember,

2600k @ 4.9ghz = around 3770k 4.7ghz = around 4770k = 4.5ghz

You aren't even close to bottlenecking that 980 GTX.
 
I think it might be time to do a clean wipe of my drive and install a fresh copy of 8.1. I used to reformat every 6 months back in the day - I've been running the same OS now for 3 years.
 
I used to reformat fairly often as well... Now I make backup images... much faster and less painful. I would suggest getting the Ultimate Boot CD (just google it). You can boot to that CD and select "Parted Magic" to load to a Linux environment preloaded with a lot of tools including imaging tools which allow you to backup a full drive to an image file which can be backed up onto an external USB drive.

Install windows, load all of your drivers, windows updates and base applications (office, adobe, etc...) than create your image there, with the pre-game-installation data size. The next time you need a clean install it only takes about a half hour before you're back to re-installing your games. ;)
 
Upgraded to 8.1 Pro - the performance is MUCH better. I'm not sure if it's so much the upgrade as it is a fresh install of the OS.

On another note, I was running my i7-2600K at 4.9GHz with really just changing the multiplier to 49 and a few other things. I cannot run a single pass in Prime95 without the PC crashing. However, I played hours of GTA 5 and MKX last night with no issues. Odd.
 
Upgraded to 8.1 Pro - the performance is MUCH better. I'm not sure if it's so much the upgrade as it is a fresh install of the OS.

On another note, I was running my i7-2600K at 4.9GHz with really just changing the multiplier to 49 and a few other things. I cannot run a single pass in Prime95 without the PC crashing. However, I played hours of GTA 5 and MKX last night with no issues. Odd.


If the PC crashes in Prime95 you do NOT have a good overclock. I don't care if its stable in game if Prime crashes it the CPU is NOT working properly and will cause random oddities and slowdowns. I remember when I was clocking my Sandy when the CPU was in ustable clocks sometimes even booting up to Windows sometimes took longer than normal.

Lower your clocks or up the voltage if you dare (unless you are already in dangerous levels) and makes sure it stays stable at least 10 hours (thats about the time it takes Prime95 to go through all passes and start from beginning) and have both Error Checkings in Advanced settings turned on. When you find the a stable clock your CPU will run better than a CPU clocked higher but barely stable and randomly doing math errors.
 
I brought the multiplier as low as 40 and still couldn't get Prime95 to run through. at 4.9GHz on Windows 7 the stress test could run for days with no problem.
 
I brought the multiplier as low as 40 and still couldn't get Prime95 to run through. at 4.9GHz on Windows 7 the stress test could run for days with no problem.

Make sure you have the latest version? It should pass. Check your system ram settings then. Something is unhappy.
 
Still can't figure out the CPU stress test issues. I have problems running the Intel Burn Test as well.

I ran 3DMark Fire Strike and here were my results with no crashing or artifacting:

Stock CPU Stock GPU = 11,500

4.8GHz CPU Stock GPU = 12,401

4.8GHz CPU +100/+250 GPU = 13,180

In this case I'm obviously seeing great results with CPU overclocking... Still have yet to have a game crash on me. Weirddd!
 
Thanks for the advice guys - I really appreciate you all bearing with me.

I am currently running Memtest86. HCI Memtest to follow. I didn't see evilsofa's post prior to running the software.
 
If you decide to go SLI and surround (or hell maybe even with a single 1440p display) with that setup you may find that your bus usage will spike and "bottleneck" your rig (hate that term) .... had a similar setup to what you have before upgrading as the pci was holding me back.

Shame. I figured i'd have my 2600k forever and then pass it on to my grandkids.....


hah!
 
Well I ran Memtest86 and it passed, I ran HCI Memtest overnight with four instances of the application open as per the instructions to make sure that all of my RAM was tested and I woke up this morning with 0 errors after running for over 8 hours.

All of my games run fine - I'm officially closing this issue haha!

Damn you Windows 8.
 
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