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Overclock CPU because Bottlenecking?

M

Mosie100

Limp Gawd
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Jan 4, 2010
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I recently bought an AMD Radeon R9 290 and was wondering if my CPU may be holding it back...
I don't have any experience with overclocking CPU's -- I have an Intel i5 3450 Ivy Bridge Quad Core 3.1GHz...
Should I be overclocking this? And if yes, where do I start?

I was looking at the specs for Witcher Wild Hunt and it looks like my CPU doesn't even meet minimum requirements... which drives me crazy. I'm just looking to try out SW: Battlefront in a week and want to max out the opportunity.

Thanks for your help in advance everyone.

Cheers,
The n00bie.
 
The min requirements for the witcher is an i5 2500. An Ivy Bridge i5 should be just fine, but your overclocking potential is hampered by the locked multiplier
 
Yeah, OCing an i5 or i7 that isn't unlocked to any substantial degree is near to impossible because changing the multiplier is so important, and it's locked on non-K series chips.

To OC modern Intel CPUs you need two things -- a P series or Z series chipset based motherboard and a K series chip.

The P and Z series boards have the necessary BIOS settings unlocked (multiplier, bclock), support more PCIe lanes, more SATA ports, and are generally better suited for use in a gaming or multimedia PC. The K series chips allow the multiplier to be changed, which is the main way you OC newer chips. This is a departure from the earlier Pentiums (P2/3/4s) where increasing the bclock equivalent was the main means of increasing the speed the chip ran at, and there was no such thing as an "unlocked" or "locked" chip.

In a way, Intel has acknowledged OCing is a thing and supported it to some extent with the K series chips, but at the same time they developed a way to charge a price premium to enable OCing.


So the bad news is, no OC for you without a new chip. The good news is, a 3.1Ghz Ivy Bridge i5 is plenty fast and likely isn't "bottlenecking" you to any substantial degree.
 
As mentioned above, you can't overclock with your current CPU. You should have an unlocked multiplier CPU in order to unleash the maximum potential of that chip, however up to ivy bridge (your chip) intel gave to all people free 4x extra multiplier, those are 400 extra mhz which really really you need. You only have to enter in the BIOS and increase the CPU multiplier to the maximum possible. With that you can mitigate a bit the bottleneck that the CPU may able to produce in some games.
 
silent-circuit said:
So the bad news is, no OC for you without a new chip. The good news is, a 3.1Ghz Ivy Bridge i5 is plenty fast and likely isn't "bottlenecking" you to any substantial degree.
Click to expand...

Oh no.. you are wrong.. for sure he will face some games where he will he severely bottlenecked. For those games he need at least at 4.5ghz to reduce the bottleneck.. games like Dragon Age inquisition, GTA V, watch dogs, crysis 3 will crush any tiny i5 as few examples.. specially with AMD GPUs that suffer from severe CPU overhead under DX11 titles.
 
Araxie said:
Oh no.. you are wrong.. for sure he will face some games where he will he severely bottlenecked. For those games he need at least at 4.5ghz to reduce the bottleneck.. games like Dragon Age inquisition, GTA V, watch dogs, crysis 3 will crush any tiny i5 as few examples.. specially with AMD GPUs that suffer from severe CPU overhead under DX11 titles.
Click to expand...

Until a week ago I was running a pair of Radeon 6950 2GBs with a very mild OC on the 2500K. Played all those titles without issue at 1920x1200. The whole "CPU bottleneck" thing is heavily over-stated in my experience. Am I saying he won't get improved performance with higher CPU clocks? Of course he will. My point is, the main thing determining if you have a good or bad experience in most modern games, assuming you at least have an i5 or i7 quad of pretty much any generation, is GPU power.
 
you have a couple of 980TI right?. you know how weak are that couple of 6950s compared to newer GPUS right?. also how much OC'd was the 2500K remember that even at stock clocks the 2500K boost at 3.4ghz which by that only fact will perform better than the ivy 3450 at 3.1ghz. anything above 4.2hz is recommended for sandy bridge and above i5s just to be able to maintain as much as possible 60FPS.
 
So forgive me if I'm a little bit confused.
From all the responses I've heard: 1) I can not overclock/shouldn't overclock 2) My CPU is just fine and isn't really holding back my performance 3)On the other hand, I can unlock 400MHz and increase my multiplier somehow and this would be in my best interest?

Any thoughts on that -- also I wouldn't know where to start on unlocking the CPU and increasing the CPU multiplier as high as possible. I understand going into the BIOS and after searching shortly online I'm sure I could figure it out -- but I'm less experienced at dealing with this sort of thing.
 
you can't overclock freely with your CPU because isn't a "K" SKU chip,, only "K" have unlocked multiplier for overclocking. And yes you can increase 400mhz extra mhz effectively to your max boost clock, you have just to enter in BIOS, OC Tweaker section and then change CPU Ratio to the max available, save and restart and done, you will receive 400mhz which will turbo all the way up to 3.7ghz when the 4 cores are full load which trust me it's a must with a lot of games or you will face a bottleneck.
 
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