i5 750 is it time ?

N

Nahawand

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 1, 2011
Messages
213
I know it has been time for a while now but I have a question, I was never a big believer when it came to bottlenecking I know it's there but usually it's overexaggerated.

Anyway up until two weeks ago I have been playing with a GTX 680, but I got a great deal on the GTX 970 in sig so I snatched it up, now before on my 680 I have never seen the usage drop below 99% in any game minus v-sync or fps cap offcourse.

But now with the 970 I noticed it in two games so far have not tested more but, in Fallout 4 in some places in the city the card hovers around 55%-65% while the cpu is at 75-90% thing is it's not at 60fps, I am seeing 45fps with the gpu at 50% meaning something somewhere is bottlenecking anyway I chucked it up to bad game optimization.

Two days ago I got Watch Dogs, same thing happened some places 99% others are 80% and drops to 50% while driving in the city with again the cpu seems to be spiking.

Now I have not tested many more games but I did watch some gameplay videos on these games with Skylake and a 970, and the guy seems to maintain 99% usage on the card witch led me to believe that I am infact being bottlenecked.

So what do you guy sudgest is this CPU actually holding me back even with the 4.1GHz overclock or is it just something else ?
 
If you downclock/overclock even further and the framerate goes down/up significantly at your resolution, it's the CPU.

That said, whether or not it is time to upgrade depends on your tolerance for sub60fps gameplay.

How much higher can you overclock? 4.5Ghz?
 
I have the unique experience of going backwards from 5930k and 6600k rigs to an i5-760. I can tell you that the P55 chipset sucks compared to modern stuff, not even having true SATA III onboard is a real hassle.

It is the weakest link when you look at a card like the 390X I just sold (or the 970 you have), even overclocked to 3800mhz with 2333mhz RAM I have to drop the settings on some of my games to medium to get a similar frame rate as I was seeing maxed out before, and forget about multitasking.

This was the one that surprised me the most, I was trying to encode a short video clip while playing a game, a task that the 6600k didn't even notice, and everything slowed to a crawl and became unresponsive. It is definitely CPU bound in a lot of titles, I can see with afterburner all 4 cores going to 90%+ constantly. You've gotten a good run out of it if you had it for this long, maybe its time to think about that upgrade.

For me, since I'll be having to use this rig for a little longer I picked up a Xeon X3470 on ebay for $40 which will give it a little higher base clock and hyperthreading, hopefully that will help a little bit.
 
mda said:
If you downclock/overclock even further and the framerate goes down/up significantly at your resolution, it's the CPU.

That said, whether or not it is time to upgrade depends on your tolerance for sub60fps gameplay.

How much higher can you overclock? 4.5Ghz?
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These are first gen i5 mate they don't clock any higher, but will try to go back to stock and test was thinking about that myself.

LigTasm said:
I have the unique experience of going backwards from 5930k and 6600k rigs to an i5-760. I can tell you that the P55 chipset sucks compared to modern stuff, not even having true SATA III onboard is a real hassle.

It is the weakest link when you look at a card like the 390X I just sold (or the 970 you have), even overclocked to 3800mhz with 2333mhz RAM I have to drop the settings on some of my games to medium to get a similar frame rate as I was seeing maxed out before, and forget about multitasking.

This was the one that surprised me the most, I was trying to encode a short video clip while playing a game, a task that the 6600k didn't even notice, and everything slowed to a crawl and became unresponsive. It is definitely CPU bound in a lot of titles, I can see with afterburner all 4 cores going to 90%+ constantly. You've gotten a good run out of it if you had it for this long, maybe its time to think about that upgrade.

For me, since I'll be having to use this rig for a little longer I picked up a Xeon X3470 on ebay for $40 which will give it a little higher base clock and hyperthreading, hopefully that will help a little bit.
Click to expand...

I think it's pretty much this, yes I have had this system for 5 years+, indeed not having SATA III was a pain especially having half the SSD speed I should be getting, also I was thinking the same of grabbing an i7 8xx for cheap thinking maybe the hyper thread would help, but to be honest maybe it's just time to step up.
 
You can also decrease the resolution to see if you have a CPU bottleneck. If the frame rate remains the same in the same area, it's definitely the CPU.

But yes, it could be that time, since you are hardcore about 60fps at all times :D. Fallout 4 has 8 threads as well, so you could definitely benefit from an i7 upgrade.
 
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long past time to upgrade 66-6700k/ddr4 is the right choice
 
Just wanna say thanks for all the suggestions, seems like some people interpreted my post to me being hardcore about 60fps all the time, no it's not that it's me getting the most out of every component.
 
BTW, for FO4 just turn LOD distance to medium and you'll get much better frame rates. Same thing you have to do on any AMD CPU.
 
Nahawand said:
Just wanna say thanks for all the suggestions, seems like some people interpreted my post to me being hardcore about 60fps all the time, no it's not that it's me getting the most out of every component.
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I get you, value is also important.

I'm just pointing out for your future upgrade advice that many new engines are massively multithreaded, in order to perform well on 6-7 Jaguar cores.

You can get the slightly better performance than a console with a Core i3, or you can get solid performance with a Core i5, or you can get the best performance with a Core i7.

In engines with this many threads, the more hardware threads you have the better. There's a context switch penalty if you have a lot more software threads than hardware to handle them, which is why you see such higher minimums for the Core i7.

But you'll have to see graphed frame rates to really get a feel for how often it goes that low. I was surprised they didn't provide that, but other sites may.
 
OP,

I am still on an i5-750 @ 3.8GHz w/ a GTX 980 and a 4K G-Sync display. When I was on my 1080p 120Hz display my CPU usage never hit 100% while gaming but when I gamed on a 4K display it maxed out easy. Therefore I think at your resolution the bottleneck is there but isn't as apparent due to the relatively relaxed (1080p) settings. If you were gaming on a higher resolution like 1440p and esp 4K+ then you will want to upgrade that CPU stat. Hence why this BF weekend I gots myself an i7-4790k to show respect to the rest of my rig :)
 
If you're on a tight budget. Grab yourself a used in 3570k and overclock that with a nice Z77 board. That is what I'm using and the performance is wonderful. You could also go haswell or buy all new stuff for skylake
 
Ryankirsch13 said:
If you're on a tight budget. Grab yourself a used in 3570k and overclock that with a nice Z77 board. That is what I'm using and the performance is wonderful. You could also go haswell or buy all new stuff for skylake
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Yeah, I'd go Haswell for the budget build. You can get a great deal like this MSI SLI z97 motherboard for $105:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...&cm_re=z97_motherboard-_-13-130-801-_-Product

And the 4690k is only $225 on Amazon,

http://www.amazon.com/Intel-Core-i5-4690K-Processor-BX80646I54690K/dp/B00KPRWB9G

So you get a very capable system with a full warranty for $330. That's what I would do, since Haswell is currently on closeout!

You won't get much lower price with Ivy Bridge, and you'll have to take whatever motherboard you can get, since you can't buy them new anymore.
 
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Just as an aside to the OP, I got my Xeon X3470 in yesterday. It makes a HUGE difference in CPU bound games, my minimums doubled in several games and the maximums went up a lot as well. Seems like a really good way to spend $40. Windows also doesn't lock up any more for brief periods if I'm in a game and alt-tab out to do something else.
 
LigTasm said:
Just as an aside to the OP, I got my Xeon X3470 in yesterday. It makes a HUGE difference in CPU bound games, my minimums doubled in several games and the maximums went up a lot as well. Seems like a really good way to spend $40. Windows also doesn't lock up any more for brief periods if I'm in a game and alt-tab out to do something else.
Click to expand...

I was very interested when I read your comment about the Xeon, so I went on ebay and picked up a x3440, should arrive here next week gonna test it out, this was before you made this comment btw, for a long time I was thinking of getting the i7 875k to see if it helps, but when I checked the Xeon prices and saw it's the same ship with much lower price I got one. I will also report back when I get it.

Also LigTasm do you happen to have Witcher 3 ? if yes how smooth is it just riding around on the horse ? with this Xeon maybe report back with CPU usage ?

For everyone else that have contributed to this thread again thanks for all the suggestions. If the Xeon thing won't cut it out I will go with a 6700k/z170 and just be done with it.
 
Nahawand said:
I was very interested when I read your comment about the Xeon, so I went on ebay and picked up a x3440, should arrive here next week gonna test it out, this was before you made this comment btw, for a long time I was thinking of getting the i7 875k to see if it helps, but when I checked the Xeon prices and saw it's the same ship with much lower price I got one. I will also report back when I get it.

Also LigTasm do you happen to have Witcher 3 ? if yes how smooth is it just riding around on the horse ? with this Xeon maybe report back with CPU usage ?

For everyone else that have contributed to this thread again thanks for all the suggestions. If the Xeon thing won't cut it out I will go with a 6700k/z170 and just be done with it.
Click to expand...

I do have witcher 3 but I've never played it more than 5 minutes or so. When I got it I had an R9 Fury and it ran so badly that I uninstalled it and never looked back (this was on a totally different machine I think I had 6600k at the time).
 
Runt. said:
OP,

I am still on an i5-750 @ 3.8GHz w/ a GTX 980 and a 4K G-Sync display. When I was on my 1080p 120Hz display my CPU usage never hit 100% while gaming but when I gamed on a 4K display it maxed out easy. Therefore I think at your resolution the bottleneck is there but isn't as apparent due to the relatively relaxed (1080p) settings. If you were gaming on a higher resolution like 1440p and esp 4K+ then you will want to upgrade that CPU stat. Hence why this BF weekend I gots myself an i7-4790k to show respect to the rest of my rig :)
Click to expand...

He lists a 1440P monitor in his signature fyi
 
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