CPU Bottleneck?

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VolvoR

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Jan 28, 2004
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System in sig:

The question is, how much of a bottleneck is my current CPU? How much would overclocking help (all in-game)? At a recent LAN party the guys said that the CPU is the major thing holding my system back from performing any better. How much truth is there to that?

Without going crazy (FX-60) what CPU should I be using? Dual core 4400 or something like that? Would that make a difference?

Thanks
 
It depends. For GPU-heavy games it won't make one bit of difference. Otherwise you're probably talking about getting an extra 4 or 5 fps here and there if you had a faster CPU. Some games have multi-threaded patches now, but they only really help at low resolutions, which is not what your SLI setup is for...
 
If your 3700+ is a bottleneck my 3200+ is a cork. You should be fine. If you want to go to dual core seeing that you have a compentent system i would wait for next gen and see how far prices drop. Thats my plan right now.
 
VolvoR said:
System in sig:

The question is, how much of a bottleneck is my current CPU? How much would overclocking help (all in-game)? At a recent LAN party the guys said that the CPU is the major thing holding my system back from performing any better. How much truth is there to that?

Without going crazy (FX-60) what CPU should I be using? Dual core 4400 or something like that? Would that make a difference?

Thanks
Click to expand...

You may see a 2 to 10 fps increase...but thats with the ATI 1900 series.
 
dont listen to anyone that talks down to your l33t system.. your system rocks dude.. he oviousy dosnt know what hes talking about.. maybe hes thinking athlon XP... cause that CPU is awesome...
 
Warrior said:
dont listen to anyone that talks down to your l33t system.. your system rocks dude.. he oviousy dosnt know what hes talking about.. maybe hes thinking athlon XP... cause that CPU is awesome...
Click to expand...

Righto, That cpu may be holding your system back a little, but the rest of your system is kickass, don't worry about it, i know i wouldn't ;)
 
Dual core will give you a performance bump, but mainly because nvidia was so kind as to provide multithreaded drivers. If you can wait, your system is pretty nice as is.
 
An increase in fsb may help with memory bandwidth and overall gaming 'feel'. I know fsb was always a killer bottleneck on my intel rigs. Either way, your system is very nice indeed.
 
but hey.. if you want to buy a better CPU we arnt trying to stop you.. we are giving you incite to weather your current system is a bottleneck.... it seems you got the money for SLI.. you can probrably afford to by a FX proc...
 
Dual core would make a difference. CPU speed...makes a little bit of difference but not as much as dual core. The nvidia drivers can gain as much as 30% in frame rate with dual core over single core (under ideal conditions that will never actually happen)

Just going to an XP3800 X2 would give you within 5-10FPS of an FX60 in Quake4. (This was posted in a CPU comparison a while back)

If you were to just increase speed and stay single core, increasing from 2.0 to 2.4 GHz (a 20% increase) would net about 6% increase in FPS. That shows it takes a much larger increase in CPU speed than the increase in frame rate returned.
 
^^ seems accurate. a default 3700 @ 2.2ghz might "hold back" (and I use that term very loosely) a GTX pair a litte... for max FPS... most of the IQ calculation happen on the cards, but getting higher frames seems to be bound to processor speed with SLI'd GTX pairs... anyways, your machine does rock! so let's just get that out of the way, but if you were looking for a little performance boost, you could OC your processor a bit, most 3700 san diego core cpus do 2.6ghz at least on default vcore... that might yield you a 10 to 15 percent frame rate gain in certain games... just guessing, maybe a bit optimistically... ;) but a medium level dual core, like an overclocked Opteron 170 or X2 4400 would give your machine a nice litte kick in the pants. The FX60 is a bit overpriced IMO... ATM anyways... before you drop any $$ on upgrades, maybe try some simple FSB overclocking.. and see if you like the difference..

good luck!
 
Thanks for the insight, guys!! I really appreciate the time...

It seems the general concensus is that if I'm going to upgrade, the best way to go would be dual core, going to a single core 4000+ would be a waste of money.

So, when it's time to upgrade, I'll be looking for a dual core, maybe a 4400+...?!?
 
thats a great proccessor and will be really great for yoursetup... i would take rev's advice and just OC the piss out of your san deagle
 
You guys have mentioned that nVidia's drivers take advantage of multi-core arrangements. What about ATI's drivers? (I just bought an Opt 165 and I'm trying to choose a GPU.)
 
Sifu said:
You guys have mentioned that nVidia's drivers take advantage of multi-core arrangements. What about ATI's drivers? (I just bought an Opt 165 and I'm trying to choose a GPU.)
Click to expand...


edit: http://www.driverheaven.net/articles/dualcore512/ ATI has some dual-core optimizations, but only for D3D, not OpenGL.

nvidia's drivers offload some of the vertex processing to the second cpu, allowing a performance increase of up to or perhaps a little more than 10%. ATI doesn't use the CPU for any vertex processing, so they couldn't do exactly the same thing. I would really like some multithreaded driver action for my X800, even if the performance increase is small.
 
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