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Hey guys, a while back I made this and this post on the forum because my HD4850 was performing pretty crappy compared to what I had seen online and when comparing to my brothers 8800GT. Everyone seemed to be pretty split on what the problem was, with a lot of people recommending cpu bottleneck, driver issue, windows issue. So I resintalled Vista a million times with no change, reinstalled drivers with no change, so that left me with only one other option, except I couldn't test it until now since I bought a new CPU.
Well I have been using my new E8500 for about 2 weeks now, and I can honestly say it was most certainly a cpu issue. However, it wasn't a frequency issue, because I had my old E2160 clocked at exactly 3.1GHz while the E8500 is 3.166GHz stock.
Here is my old screenshot with the E2160 @ 3.1GHz (344x9):
And here is the new screenshot with E8500 @ 3.166GHz (333x9.5):
Also here is an image from this benchmark I found online with E8400 @ 4.0GHz:
And finally, a screenshot with my E8500 @ 3.8GHz (400x9.5):
Every single one of these benchmarks was run at 1680x1050 with all high settings and 4xMSAA and 8xAF
Now based on these results I would have to say that the obvious problem here was the lack of cache in my E2160. Clock speeds the same, I went from 1MB of shared cache to 6MB of shared cache and FPS went up by 67!
Clock frequency seems to have only a minimal effect. You can see that increasing nearly 700MHz from my E8500 @ 3.166 to 3.8GHz only increases by ~13fps, and then going on to 4.0GHz from there gives ~3.5fps.
Hope this helps someone out in the future, because for me it would have been nice to know that it was just a lack of cache so that I didn't have to go through the pain of reformatting and resintalling drivers a million times.
Well I have been using my new E8500 for about 2 weeks now, and I can honestly say it was most certainly a cpu issue. However, it wasn't a frequency issue, because I had my old E2160 clocked at exactly 3.1GHz while the E8500 is 3.166GHz stock.
Here is my old screenshot with the E2160 @ 3.1GHz (344x9):
And here is the new screenshot with E8500 @ 3.166GHz (333x9.5):
Also here is an image from this benchmark I found online with E8400 @ 4.0GHz:
And finally, a screenshot with my E8500 @ 3.8GHz (400x9.5):
Every single one of these benchmarks was run at 1680x1050 with all high settings and 4xMSAA and 8xAF
Now based on these results I would have to say that the obvious problem here was the lack of cache in my E2160. Clock speeds the same, I went from 1MB of shared cache to 6MB of shared cache and FPS went up by 67!
Clock frequency seems to have only a minimal effect. You can see that increasing nearly 700MHz from my E8500 @ 3.166 to 3.8GHz only increases by ~13fps, and then going on to 4.0GHz from there gives ~3.5fps.Hope this helps someone out in the future, because for me it would have been nice to know that it was just a lack of cache so that I didn't have to go through the pain of reformatting and resintalling drivers a million times.