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Bottleneck help...

B

BradF1979

Limp Gawd
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Nov 27, 2009
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Curious if I have a bottleneck.

I have a GIGABYTE GA-P55-UD4P LGA 1156 running an i5 at 3.2Ghz standard voltage with 4GB DDR3 1600. I had been running 2x ATI Radeon 5770s and still not getting the performance I thought I should in newer games (@ 1680x1050 res). I'm running Windows x64.

I'm upgrading to a 6950 and adding another 4 GB of DDR3 1600 but worried that maybe my CPU was the issue. I really don't want to upgrade motherboard/CPU etc...

As far as an SSD, that's just going to help loading times right? Not performance once the load is complete.
 
Crossfire performance can be real iffy. Some games have great gpu scaling, where others have poor or negative scaling.

First, 1680x1050 is a little low for multiple GPU configurations. The lower resolution you go, the CPU speed is more noticeable as the GPU becomes less of a bottleneck. Plus, in a multi-gpu setup the CPU can be taxed a little more, especially only a dual core.

Going to 4GB of ram is almost certainly not going to improve your gaming experience at all, so don't expect any boost from that. This is not considering you may have other reasons to go to 8GB though.

Moving to a 6950 will help. If your playing modern games, moving to a quad core CPU would also help a bit, as most games now days can take advantage of at least 3 cores, many now being fully quad core aware.

SSD's can help load times to some degree. It's really hard to say though because some games write a lot of data, which an SSD can help, and some almost entirely read. Toms did a review of SSD's in gaming a few months ago, check it out. I did some experimenting with ramdisk a year ago or so and found that some games do not load faster, compared to an SSD, when reading/writing to a 7,000 MB/s ramdisk. Faster disk does not always translate to faster gaming performance. But a good rule of thumb is that SSD will increase your system responsiveness. On my current setup, which includes an SSD, I hooked up a hard drive and reinstalled Windows 7. My entire system was noticeably slower on the hard drive, after spending over a year on an SSD and being used to that. The funny thing though is that when I moved to the SSD, I didn't notice an improvement, but I definitely noticing going backwards ;)
 
An SSD will help with load times and also any textures that need to be loaded as well, think entering a city in an MMO, other than that not really. A good way to tell if your cpu is bottlenecking is running a game at its lowest res and compare the frame rates to your normal res. Best bet is just to experiment and or OC the processor and see if it improves at the lower res if it does then your CPU is holding you back. It will also depend on the game to.
 
Isn't an i5 750 a quad core? Pretty sure it is...

Thanks for your reply, going to check out some stuff.
 
the I5 2500 is just no hyperthreading

Edit wrong chip but yes the 750 is as well
 
BradF1979 said:
Isn't an i5 750 a quad core? Pretty sure it is...

Thanks for your reply, going to check out some stuff.
Click to expand...
No chip version was specified. I just looked up 3.2GHZ i5 1156 and found a dual core.

If you have the quad, then I would say the next upgrade would be to move to a faster single GPU.
 
Thanks... I apologize.. I had forgotten how many versions of the i5 their were... it's a 750 overclocked to 3.2Ghz.
 
Crossfire scaling with the HD 5xxx series was ok, definitely a step up over the HD 4xxx series Crossfire scalings. But it wasn't until the HD 6xxx series that Crossfire scaling was pretty great.

In any case, that new GPU should help. To eliminate any potential bottlenecks or limitations, just OC your CPU to 3.8Ghz and above.
 
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