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New GPU with an older system???

J

JoseJones

Gawd
Joined
Jun 6, 2012
Messages
602
I am curious to find out how much my older system may be affecting the performance of my new GPU and how much so to find out if it's enough to need a new system yet. I'm open to any suggestions for ideas to consider. Or maybe I'm ok until Skylake comes out?

Mainly, I wonder if my SATA 2 & PCI 2.0 motherboard, CPU & HD are holding back my GPU during gaming? But, when I read a review of mobos with PCI 3.0 it didn't seem to make a bit of difference at all.

Mostly, I work with CS6 and make videos but, I slip in some gaming whenever I can such as TitanFall, Dirt 3 & Showdown, BF3 etc.

I have the NVidia 760 SC.

MB: MSI 790FX-GD70
CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 955
RAM: 8g Mushkin 1600
GPU: Evga 760 SC 2g
PSU: Seasonic X-750w
HD: WD Blue 500g, 16mb cache
EX-HD: 1T
Case: Antec One Illusion (w/4 fans)
OS: Windows 7 Pro, 64-bit

* Edit: I forgot to mention I have a single monitor at 1080: ASUS 21.5 VS229H (IPS) and previously, I had the 4870 1g, which I still have.
 
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The CPU is a huge bottleneck in this case. I would look into upgrading your platform to H81 and an Intel i5-4570.
 
I am using a 955 at stock and declocked states, not a single game I have played over the last 2 years plays badly, from a 4870 to a 6870 to a 7870 they all get within the same margin of error FPS that games should be getting.(1080p I get from 50-80fps 90% maxed out but only using 2-4xaa and 12xaf) Will a faster CPU be better, of course it will, does it make that cpu worthless to use umm, no.

Some folks state getting double the fps from a P2 to a "modern" i7, some of these same folks claim that with the P2 gameplay was sluggish, unresponsive etc and magically the game became uber playable with the new i7, there are some that say from a P2x4 or P2x6 to an i7 the game performance was not a huge jump just a small amount so they felt disappointed with the price/performance gain.

Look at it this way, not all games are cpu intensive, so for the games that are most very much are intel biased these games will of course see a benefit from a new fast intel cpu, however, there are many games out there that still have great performance with older cpu and/or are gpu biased so they will still play fine.

depending on resolution, game and game settings, and finally if you were to use a stinking high-end gpu or multiple gpu then the cpu would be a massive bottleneck but I can almost 100% say without a shadow of a doubt, the gpu in this case is not being held back unless it is in the games/apps that are very much intel biased to begin with seeing as it is not a uber high end gpu.
 
for comparison sake, look up some reviews of the games you play with high end intel cpu and same or near gpu and see performance it will be a good increase in some cases a small one in others, where the benchmarks surprisingly will be massive.
 
You could also get a cheap and used Sandy Bridge system on FS/FT. Motherboards are cheap, and the CPU's aren't bad either. A quad-core i5, like the 2400 or 3470 should rock in comparison. Since you already have the GPU, the question now is - are you not satisfied?
 
Well I will say that my experience going from a Core 2 from the same generation to a Haswell i7 on a GTX 570 resulted in an exponentially better experience for myself. I agree with jbltecnicspro that an upgrade to Sandy Bridge would be a good move if you don't have the money for something new. They have held up extremely well performance wise over the past few years.
 
I forgot to mention I have a single monitor at 1080: ASUS 21.5 VS229H (IPS) and previously, I had the 4870 1g (which I still have) prior to my Nvidia 760 SC.

My system runs pretty damn good to be honest and I'm not noticing any serious issues while gaming but, I thought I'd check in with some experts with loads of experience here. I am able to run most any game pretty much at maxed out settings for the most part. And my monitor at 1080. I've been using v-sync too.

I will take into consideration all of the suggestions here. I did plan on upgrading to SkyLake in the future and planned on taking my 760 with it and upgrading the GPU a year or two after that so I don't have to come up with all that cash at once. That's if my current system will last.

I was waiting until these come out before getting a new system, if possible, but they sure are slow to come:

DDR 4
DisplayPort 1.3
HDMI 2.0
DirectX 12
SATA 4 or Express 3.2
PCIe 4.0 - not sure if it even matters since it sure didn't with 3.0
 
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and going to be quite $ when that time comes I wager.(boards being ddr4 are going to be quite new, chips to use it will be new, and ddr4 I bet just like ddr3 at launch will be very expensive though should have a good performance jump as they are already beyond the baseline speed)

Of course going from core 2 to haswell was a drastic performance gain, question then, core 2 duo such as E6700 or core 2 quad such as Q9500?

The gains from a core 2 duo to a phenom II helped me by quite a large margin(to first gen i7 was a bump, 2nd-3rd gen more so of course but is it a can play vs unplayable with single gpu I doubt it) and I had a highly clocked E8400 with a really fast FSB playing most games. The clocked up E8400 vs a stock 955 was a small boost, but playing games that could use multi-core effectively (BF3/4-BC2 etc) the gain was massive. So then IMHO its your $, the 955 is not a slow chip by any means.

If you get a good deal, do it, but if the games you play right now are doing fine and you are happy with the performance stick with it. You would get a boost in performance no doubt, and a pretty good reduction in power if you can handle the cost, I would say wait until what you want comes out unless you have the $ to quote end quote throw away essentially, just get the bits and pieces you know you will be using when that times comes, my advice.
 
JoseJones said:
I did plan on upgrading to SkyLake in the future and planned on taking my 760 with it and upgrading the GPU a year or two after that so I don't have to come up with all that cash at once. That's if my current system will last.
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then don't even bother with anything before. If it performs decently right now, just save your money.
 
The CPU may be holding you back from super high framerates, or limiting you on some settings, but I wouldn't think it would be making anything unplayable. Based on the Bench comparison, I would think you would get a more noticeable improvement in your CS6 experience from a CPU upgrade than in your gaming experience. Granted that is comparing it to a 2500K at stock, which is no slouch for almost any game out there today (the newer 4670K isn't that much ahead of a 2500K for most games from what I've read).

How far have you been able to OC your 955? I had a terrible overclocking chip when I had one, but my 1090T was a monster, and at 4GHz held its own against the 2500K. Experimenting with overclocking may be a worthwhile avenue to hold you over a bit longer.

Personally, if money is an issue, I would hold out for a bit longer then upgrade when you find a good deal on some current-gen hardware. If money is not an issue then why are you even asking? :D
 
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If you play Mantle games coming up i don't see the cpu being that much of a problem. Its still alright if your not looking for super high frame rates but just average frame rates.
 
What is your utilisation on GPU and CPU. If your CPU is not good enough, then it will be at 100% while gaming and your GPU will not be high %.
Here still running a i7 2600 at stock without bottlenecking the GPU (gtx 770), I actually don't see any reason to go with a high-end CPU for gaming with a single card. It gives such small fps gains for a huge investment. If you then imagine you could spend that money on a GPU...
 
Yep, for me money is an issue, at least for now.

I have never over-clocked in order to make sure I the longest lifespan possible; due to money, I'm just scrapping by right now. I use v-sync too, so all my games, even my new ones are very playable right now. I'm not having any serious issues so, I may be fine waiting until SkyLake comes out.

The main issue I was concerned about holding me back in gaming was my: "SATA 2 & PCI 2.0 motherboard, CPU & HD"

I was wondering if I might be missing out on anything by not having a SATA 3 and PCIe 3.0 motherboard, CPU & HD? I probably am but, probably not enough to go buy anything. Perhaps SkyLake will be worth the wait???
 
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How do you do video-editing on a 500gb HDD? OS, programs,... are at least 200gb. I do editing on 1TB drives in raid 0 and still sometimes need bigger when doing bigger projects. Also, for editing a new CPU will be HUGE. I7-3930k would be my pick if you don't want to go xeon.
Is editing your hobby or your job?
 
Henri108 said:
How do you do video-editing on a 500gb HDD? OS, programs,... are at least 200gb. I do editing on 1TB drives in raid 0 and still sometimes need bigger when doing bigger projects. Also, for editing a new CPU will be HUGE. I7-3930k would be my pick if you don't want to go xeon.
Is editing your hobby or your job?
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It's both my hobby and job I just don't really do it all that much - she does most of it cause she's better at it than I am plus, she has a fairly new PC. It's a part of our small business. We each have 1T ex-HD's. I set her up with a new system when Ivy Bridge came out (replacing her old system from 2004) and a lot of very helpful people here helped me select a few things:

CPU: Ivy Bridge i7 3770
MB: Gigabyte z77 UD5
RAM: Mushkin 8g DDR3 1600
SSD: Mushkin Enhanced Chronos Deluxe DX 240g
HD: 1T WD Black
EX-HD: 1T
PSU: Seasonic X-750w
Case: Antec One Illusion (with 4 fans)
OS: Windows 7 Prof, 64-bit
Monitor: Asus VH222, 21.5in, 1080

When SkyLake comes out it's MY TURN, beeeeyotch! ; )
 
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JoseJones said:
The main issue I was concerned about holding me back in gaming was my: "SATA 2 & PCI 2.0 motherboard, CPU & HD"

I was wondering if I might be missing out on anything by not having a SATA 3 and PCIe 3.0 motherboard, CPU & HD? I probably am but, probably not enough to go buy anything. Perhaps SkyLake will be worth the wait???
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No, these things won't be holding back your gaming experience. If you stuck those features into your current system now, gaming would not benefit from it - at least in a tangible way. Like everyone has said before, your CPU is currently your biggest bottleneck. But if your gaming experience is still good, then you can still hold out even longer yet. :)

EDIT: And not that it matters, but who is this SHE you refer to in your post above? GF? Wife? Would she be willing for you to switch PC's and put your GTX-760 in that one? :D
 
jbltecnicspro said:
EDIT: And not that it matters, but who is this SHE you refer to in your post above? GF? Wife? Would she be willing for you to switch PC's and put your GTX-760 in that one? :D
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Oh god, ssshhhhhh. She doesn't even know I bought the 760 so, that's just between us. If she finds out what I spent that money on there could be a divorce! :eek:
 
omg just cause it uses 100% cpu and low gpu does not always mean its a cpu bottleneck, examples, world of tanks, war thunder, diablo 3, there are tons of games out there that are poorly optimized and will not load the gpu or cpu properly that is a very crappy way to see if there is a bottleneck, easiest way I can think of, same settings but clock the cpu up or clock down and lower the resolution, clock gpu down basically put as much bias towards the cpu as possible you should see a drastic reduction in performance if it is a true bottleneck or clock the cpu up to get it as fast as possible (safely of course) in games that can use the cpu power, if bottlenecked it should not see much an improvement in speed, world of tanks again, me running at 2.6Ghz or 4.3Ghz with my 955 clocked every way from sunday I still get ~40-11FPS depending so again, unless you know a game that is very biased poor way of judging this, Borderlands 2 or maybe far cry 3, both of which are quite biased towards Intel and Nvidia it seems however :(

BF3 they had a nice option you could see the amount of bias towards cpu/gpu and some maps were quite good for loading both so one could see if they had a "balanced" build or was very out of whack say an Athlon II feeding a X2 style card :)

Either way there are games that rely on processor IPC and so scale very well with clock speed and scale very poorly with "slow" processors regardless of speed. the 2 I have found best myself at least have been Diablo 3 (cpu biased mostly) or metro seems to be kind of balanced where something like Crysis 3 is very heavy gpu wise.

I would say best to look up many reviews using as many cpu as possible with a given gpu at various settings, if you find that "wow I get like 15fps less then I should be getting and it is laggy because of it" then it matters, beyond this it really should not.

FYI the 2600k IS a high end cpu (only one better then its generation was the 2700k) all i7 are technically high end, i3 would be low end, i5 middle ground.

Sata 3 for SSD yes, PCIE 3.0 for a single card no not really. So then what will you see the biggest improvement in nearly everything you do, get an SSD which still are magnitudes faster then a HDDD over sata 2 AND you can always put it onto the skylake whatever motherboard when the time comes :)
 
The CPU will hold you back in some games but I wouldn't worry about it unless you start to notice performance issues in CPU intensive games. The one thing I would do if that was my PC is add an SSD, outside of a few games that dynamically stream a lot of assets you won't see any difference in performance but it will make load screens faster and more importantly it will make everything you do on the PC seem more snappy.
 
the cpu may hold you back a little in Bf4 64 player maps, but not to the point of unplayable. If anything, look for used z68 based mobos+cpu's on craigslist. you can fetch a 2500k and mobo for around $200 sometimes
 
Armenius said:
The CPU is a huge bottleneck in this case. I would look into upgrading your platform to H81 and an Intel i5-4570.
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It depends on the game. The difference between a stock AMD 965 and my OCed 4670K in Metro Last Light was about 2 frame rates with my GTX 670 OC. Similar results with Tomb Raider. CPU doesn't help much in those games.

ArmA 3? Huge difference. BF3/4 frame rates remained similar although the lows were much higher so there was a bottleneck there.

Would I upgrade from an AMD 955? Certainly! I did it a few months back (from a 965) and I strongly recommend it as many new games will be held back.
 
SSD all the way, costly yes, but so well worth it, like throwing a turbine engine on a riding lawnmower, its fast, its snazzy, and the yard is done in no time :p
 
Flogger23m said:
It depends on the game. The difference between a stock AMD 965 and my OCed 4670K in Metro Last Light was about 2 frame rates with my GTX 670 OC. Similar results with Tomb Raider. CPU doesn't help much in those games.

ArmA 3? Huge difference. BF3/4 frame rates remained similar although the lows were much higher so there was a bottleneck there.

Would I upgrade from an AMD 955? Certainly! I did it a few months back (from a 965) and I strongly recommend it as many new games will be held back.
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pointing it out exactly, depends on the game/app, the ones that benefit from Intel and the faster IPC will by a very good margin (borderlands 2 comes to mind) or the numerous extremely badly optimized games (world of tanks prime example) Intel has higher IPC and if you clock them up, this lead gets even bigger. Save power, and in some cases get a performance boost, substantial to the point of one being a snail vs the other a formula 1, no not really save a few bad examples.
 
The main issue I was concerned about holding me back in gaming was my: "SATA 2 & PCI 2.0 motherboard, CPU & HD"

I was wondering if I might be missing out on anything by not having a SATA 3 and PCIe 3.0 motherboard, CPU & HD? I probably am but, probably not enough to go buy anything. Perhaps SkyLake will be worth the wait???
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jbltecnicspro said:
No, these things won't be holding back your gaming experience. If you stuck those features into your current system now, gaming would not benefit from it - at least in a tangible way. Like everyone has said before, your CPU is currently your biggest bottleneck. But if your gaming experience is still good, then you can still hold out even longer yet. :)
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Isn't it very disappointing that SATA 3 and PCIe 3.0 make very little to no difference? What a let down! If they were all they were made out to be I'd already have one but, I see no legit reason to upgrade yet. I am hoping SkyLake won't be another major let down. I'm really fed up with all the dishonest hype blown out of proportion by marketing adverts. I'm just thankful for websites like this one to get the facts straight.

I hope SkyLake will include all of these features:

DDR 4 (pretty much already a done deal)
DisplayPort 1.3
HDMI 2.0
DirectX 12
SATA 4 or Express 3.2
PCIe 4.0 - not sure if it even matters since it sure didn't with 3.0
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylake_(microarchitecture) of course this is not gospel.
support for 20 PCI Express 3.0 lanes (LGA 1151)
support for PCI Express 4.0 (Skylake-E/EP/EX)

Now I know sata 3(sata 6 however you want to look at it) matters very little for standard systems, but when using higher end parts such as raid with fast HDD, or for current SSD this is a pretty pronounced speed difference.

I think the only thing possibly with pcie 3.0 was the doubling of speed so use less lanes get same speed(minus a bit of over head) so basically Intel and partners could cheap out on the amount of overall lanes but still offer capacities that users would like (total amount of pci-e slots usable at full speed, or more sata etc)

DX12 is up to MSFT by the way it is an OS thing primarily and unless Intel finds magical cookies, it wont matter if they support it or not as for anything outside of casual use they do not have the oomph for the video to be worthwhile :p

The other thing is, they can only stuff so much in the cpu this is why cpu may add features over the last few years, but the performance has not jumped a massive amount, compared to say graphics cards which have a crap ton of potential due to the amount of things they seem to be able to stuff under the hood, on the 1 end say a 295x2, on the opposite end say a GTX750Ti show what is possible.

Where the difference between most cpu in the same generation/family there really is not a whole hell of a lot of difference. In Intel case as it seems to be the actual socket (chipset) that is the biggest difference especially since core (i) launched, they very much seem intent on not giving the most possible as it would castrate folks from wanting/needing the highest end offerings (maybe its cause they need the extras and that is the only way they can have them for shame)
 
Oh thanks, I didn't check Wiki for info on SkyLake.

I did find these tho, which are related to Z97 but still relevant:

July 3, 2013: Report: Intel Skylake to Have PCIe 4.0, DDR4, SATA Express

Nov 20th 2013: Rumor: Intel 9-Series Chipsets Won't Feature SATA-Express

Dec 20, 2013: ASUS is ready for SATA Express

March 19, 2014: Intel to renew commitment to desktop PCs with a slew of new CPUs

"I spoke briefly with [Intel's new GM and VP of its Desktop Client Platforms Group, Lisa Graff] at CES about her plans, and she observed that high-end desktop processor sales had been fairly flat in recent years—but when she looked at the performance numbers, the reason was clear. Intel hasn't given enthusiasts much of a reason to upgrade since Sandy Bridge."

http://linustechtips.com/main/topic...tment-to-desktop-pcs-with-a-slew-of-new-cpus/
 
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well that is the thing and have heard it many times, the ability to give massive performance improvements generation after generation with CPU are not quite possible, minor bumps yes, but generally speaking all they really can do is give moderate bumps, exception is the very high end (especially in Intel case) as they add more core, more threads etc. So they are at least to a point constrained by design A and B they seem to very much do it on purpose to slow down performance improvements cause they really do not need to.

This has always been the case between say Intel and AMD, if AMD gives a reason for Intel to ramp performance then they will, GPU have really shown this to be true if you look at say the Radeon 4k to the current R-2xx series performance has ramped a massive amount same with Nvidia 2xx to current 7xx(soon 8xx) massive performance improvement, feature sets, and general reduction in power or at least a fairly substantial increase in efficiency. CPU generation after generation have not nearly boosted much overall performance comparatively speaking, just slight gain, slight better power use, somewhat better feature set (unless they trying for the big $ for not other reason then they can)

Now the one I linked did say Skylake PCI-E 4.0 so its not really lying if it means on the -E variant only, but it would be not exactly honest as this would be reserved for the very highest end chips(and $ motherboards) which would more then likely mean and as it is now for the most part, want to use many hard-drives, have access to many lanes for expansion cards etc, then you need to stomach the more then likely huge cost increase of x89 or whatever the new highest end socket will be called, and will be released at a later date, they did this with all previous generations of -E capable chips and chipsets.

I do not picture skylake changing this, as they do not need to, I am quite sure they can give all the capabilities of -E to the non -E chips to "trim" the offerings and still have a good lineup say like they did with core 2 Quads or Core 2 Duo, but they like $ more even if there is no other reason no to do it.

Sata express is a funny thing and probably will end up initially being as sata 3 was, not officially supported but makers (Asus, Gigabyte etc) can add it via add-on chips.
 
Crap, I may have to wait for the 2nd rev. on SkyLake ... I am waiting for DDR4 3200 and it will only start out at 2133.

What will come after SkyLake? I had to look it up, it's code name is: "Cannonlake" or Skymont

Wiki says it will be 10 nm.
 
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ddr4 minimum speed is apparently 2133, 3200 is going to be mucho $ if/when it become available. Not to mention, there will probably be next to no overall use for it cause the CL will be so damn high, but it really depends on the cpu it is attached to I suppose.

skylake 2015-2016, cannondale will be a shrink of so it will be 2017 or so, then the next ~2018. If you plan on waiting for 2nd revision that would be -E variant and only Intel really knows when they will be launching that so plan on waiting awhile as they still have yet to release haswell -E which will or should be the next one out.
 
Upgrade to at least a i7 930, as you can pick a chip and board combo up pretty cheap. The benchmark improvements from that chip being oc to about 4.7 compared to a 4930k are not that far off.
 
I will put off upgrading as long as I can in order to get what I really want but, one issue that does bug me is the AMD Phenom II X4 955 CPU is 125 watts and produces serious heat when gaming. This is an issue for me because we don't have central air and it gets 85-90 in here at times.

So, energy efficiency and heat are important issues to me but, my system runs almost like new right now and I'm short on money right now anyway. If I come into a decent chunk of money I may change my mind.

I'm also very disappointed with the new Z97 set up. There's nothing there that motivates me or inspires me to buy at all. As many experienced experts have already said, it's just a Z87 re-fresh.
 
JoseJones said:
I will put off upgrading as long as I can in order to get what I really want but, one issue that does bug me is the AMD Phenom II X4 955 CPU is 125 watts and produces serious heat when gaming. This is an issue for me because we don't have central air and it gets 85-90 in here at times.

So, energy efficiency and heat are important issues to me but, my system runs almost like new right now and I'm short on money right now anyway. If I come into a decent chunk of money I may change my mind.

I'm also very disappointed with the new Z97 set up. There's nothing there that motivates me or inspires me to buy at all. As many experienced experts have already said, it's just a Z87 re-fresh.
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I don't know man, I'd probably look at it differently. First off, Haswell performs much better than your current setup, and regardless of what features you want - for gaming it will not make much tangible differences. You may want to consider segmenting your PC experience. Keep a large workstation desktop for the video rendering, and keep an ITX box for gaming. It shouldn't be terribly expensive to go this route.
 
^ I kind of agree with this, you can get some pretty potent gaming rigs that are also pretty good power and temps wise when you just want to game, and to get said gaming system still able to do workstation duties quite well then either you are missing on performance because you don't have the best gear in it (but also don't deal with the heat/noise/temps as much) or you have the top gear and if not using it you are wasting power/$ and having to deal with that extra heat and noise.

More costly to have 2 separate machines, but, depending on how much you do both it might actually be more cost effective.

Phenom II 955 is not a very hot running chip really even compared to the newest ones (overclocked) more power for sure average, but they do all run about the same temps (newest ones being ivy/haswell get insane hot when clocked up) get an aftermarket cooler if you do not have one on there, it can help keep the cpu cooler, though you do need to find someway to vent that extra heat out of the room somehow :p

As far as get the i7 930 and clock it up to 4.7, that is well beyond what the majority could get up to which is ~4.3-4.42 Ghz range, 955 BE especially the C3 rev would get to around that same clock speed 4.2-4.35, 930 would of course have the edge raw performance clocked up like this, but I for sure would also be far hotter/more power at the same time.

You do have the option of clocking your 955 down, reduce its voltage using something like K10stat so you can keep the speed but let it run cooler or downclock it and reduce power so it stays that much cooler.

I have played BF4 as an example with my chip at 4.3, 3.8, 3.2, 2.4(lowest I could get to keep cool and quiet) to see the differences and honestly there was not a huge drop in performance nor a huge gain either (for my system at 1080p or 1050p) I average ~43FPS with the settings I use, the top FPS was ~78 the low ~37 no matter the clocks, something like world of tanks using the same clocks made a grand difference of I believe it was 16FPS tops and average 7FPS, this is with my 7870 stock, declocked, and overclocked, either way all the games I play I did not notice a lack of gameplay speed for me which honestly surprised me the more I played at reducing my clocks.

Best I got and still run at, 955 at 2.4Ghz memory at 1600 something (has been at this for awhile) memory controller was 2600 (something) top voltage reduced to 1.18v instead of 1.35v for 3.2 low voltage .865 instead of .925 idle sits at 27c vs 34c load hits 35c vs 43-47c my 7870 I run at 535/650 core mem at .912 volts, trial and error to find all the right speeds to reduce power but keep around the same performance, but its hella fun :)

The gpu clocking up actually had the biggest performance gain. Nvidia cards seem to be fed better with cpu that have a higher IPC (or faster clock in general) then most Radeons, however, we both have similar performing cards averaged out (I would have to clock mine up though as the SC is clocked up) either way, I would say get a better cpu cooler, or use K10 stat to reduce power/temps it helps quite a bit and will still allow cool and quiet to function properly compared to doing some things via BIOS alone it will not, and you don't need a $100+ cpu cooler to get something out of it, there are coolers in the $30 range that work awesome and still have headroom if you need it, and of course can be used on most socket styles as well.
 
If you want to know if your CPU is holding your GPU back, simply have MSI afterburner running in the background while you're gaming. If you have dual monitors you can have it up simultaneously an look at the charts. If not, simply have it minimized and check the usage as soon as you leave the game. If it's at or very near 100% usage, you aren't being held back much. If you're seeing anything lower than that, then you are.

As far as Z97 is concerned, everyone knew it was going to be a refresh. But make no mistake, todays offerings are light years ahead of your current setup, both in terms of efficiency and capability. That goes for the chipset feature set as well as the CPU itself
 
not all games load the gpu up 100% nor cpu 100% so that is a loose way of looking at things. I cannot think of any test myself to show if loaded proper besides the tool built into BF3 possibly BF4 and that also does depend on maps as well some are more strenuous on gpu then others and some specific parts of even the same map more then others.

https://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf3/forum/threadview/2832654489840320059/ this can help somewhat if you find a specific map that seems to load well on both and you can then clock up or down to "balance" them as best you can. Something like an Athlon II 640 is going to hold performance back huge nearly everywhere unless you use a very old or very weak gpu, so it does at least give some visual reference of what is happening, you could pair this up with the mentioned afterburner to get an even clearer picture. Smooth is better then raw frame rates any day.
 
dragonstongue said:
not all games load the gpu up 100% nor cpu 100% so that is a loose way of looking at things. I cannot think of any test myself to show if loaded proper besides the tool built into BF3 possibly BF4 and that also does depend on maps as well some are more strenuous on gpu then others and some specific parts of even the same map more then others.

https://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf3/forum/threadview/2832654489840320059/ this can help somewhat if you find a specific map that seems to load well on both and you can then clock up or down to "balance" them as best you can. Something like an Athlon II 640 is going to hold performance back huge nearly everywhere unless you use a very old or very weak gpu, so it does at least give some visual reference of what is happening, you could pair this up with the mentioned afterburner to get an even clearer picture. Smooth is better then raw frame rates any day.
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If a game isn't loading the GPU to 100% it's because the CPU can't push it that far. There are a few exceptions, but that's what they are, few exceptions. Like games that are capped at say 60 fps and your system is capable of doing more, but there aren't too many of those around. Short of that, looking at GPU utilization is pretty accurate metric to use.

CPU utilization is another matter and you're right about that, which is why I didn't mention it. Depending on how many cores you have and how well the game scales are all going to affect it. But GPU charts are about as straight forward as it gets.
 
Beefy video cards and molasses CPUs make okay couples. The CPU doesn't particularly care about (or particularly know about) anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering and any other full-screen post-process effects. Given a slow CPU creating a bottleneck, those things end up being 'free' or 'mostly-free', meaning they don't really impact frame rates in any meaningful way.
 
I hear you Ramon, but can say how many hundreds of thousands of games are out there that are extraordinarily poorly optimized for the gpu or for the cpu, in some cases things say like Mantle or even Mining are designed to not bother loading the cpu up nearly as much if at all, so I would say exactly that find the games that are known to load the gpu up very hard, cpu up very hard, and a balance and go from there, best suggestion I can give really.

going by what wonderfield says I can kind of agree to that and extrapolate, if you take said slow cpu and take a beefy gpu you generally can adjust nearly everything + or - the highest settings and options and it really will not effect the overall FPS or gameplay feel, again just to point out something like World of tanks, it seems not to care to much what cpu or gpu you are using much as if you take a specific gpu and cpu comboa and overclock to ratshit or downclock like crazy it really does not effect the overall frames, will something like Crysis 3 with HD or skyrim load up nicely for both sides so you can do a comparison and see what kind of gain would be accepted to see if it would be worth the upgrade cost performance wise?

Cause we know Haswell as an example definitely would be faster and far more power efficient in stock form no doubt.
 
I don't know about all that... Which games might these be? My game list is rather extensive. If there here hundreds of thousands of games out there that were so poorly optimized that they couldn't push a GPU to at or near 100% no matter how powerful your CPU is, I'd have quite a few of them, and I'd like to test this claim. As it stands, I haven't witnessed any that fall into this category you mention. Out of the hundreds of games I have, there's a small handful that cannot max out my GPU, and it's for one of these three reasons.


1) Game is capped at 60
2) Game has such dated graphics that I'm pushing several hundred FPS and maxing out my CPU before the GPU
3) Game is so old, and I'm pushing the maximum FPS (in the hundreds) the engine is capable of drawing

These are fringe cases and none are of the nature you're suggesting. Now if we are talking about multi-gpu setups, that's another matter and there certainly are optimization issues, some driver, some game related that may not allow you to adequately gave a GPU bottleneck by looking at a utilization chart unless you know what you're looking for, but for a single GPU, it's a pretty reliable metric to gauge a bottleneck.

Mantle is a non-issue here. There are what, like two games that use it? And OP has an NVidia card anyway
 
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