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processor bottleneck? 5850/70

R

rayz

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 11, 2008
Messages
155
from a gaming perspective, would my current setup (processor in particular) bottleneck any potential increase in performance by upgrading to a 5850 or 5870?
 
I would also like to know too. I'm gaming with a Q6600 stock + GTX275.
 
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rayz said:
from a gaming perspective, would my current setup (processor in particular) bottleneck any potential increase in performance by upgrading to a 5850 or 5870?
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It will bottle neck your card as in you won't be using the full potential of it as you would if you have a 3.2ghz+ quad core, but honestly, if you went with the 5850 and overclocked your current CPU to 3.4ghz+ (Although I'm not sure how your CPU overclocks, might be less, might be more) especially if you already have a Xigmatek, I'm sure you would be set for a while until games really start to benefit a lot from 4 cores+.
 
An E8400 at stock speed can take the maximum benifit out of HD5850??
 
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I upgraded from a 4850 to a 5850 and saw a massive improvement. Any E6000 and up will do fine with the 5800s.
 
I do not pretend to be a super geek or have the overall qualifications for it....but, I do know this..
There is a limit on the CPU vs GPU and that debate has been proven to me big time.

I originally had an E8400 OC'd to 3.2 with an ATI 4890.
In my game of choice (Age of Conan), I could get some decent framerates...nothing spectacular...say around the 80-100's..
I then upgraded to the i5-750, OC'd to 3.6, and started to already see improvements in smoothness and the capability to turn on some features I could not before (example go to 4x or 8x AA instead of the 2x on the e8400)

Then I bought the 5870 for use on the i5. My framerates increased exponentially.

(I could actually get anywhere between 120 all the way to 200FPS at 8x AA and Super Sample on)

Now , what I can gather are two things...

1. Yes, the GPU (original 4890) was limited by my CPU to do what it needed to do (memory may have helped here as well)
2. The CPU was also hurt by the GPU, as I reached a cap on the 4890. The 5870 has opened up more power. I have even continued to play and have switched to edge-detect and 24x samples of AA, and getting a beautiful 60FPS steady bench out of Age of Conan (1920x1080)

Now, take that as you will from a lowly gamer..but, this regular old joe has been ecstatic that he bought an i5 and the 5870.

All I can say is...if the game demands more power, any upgrade should suffice...but if the game likes the CPU as well as the GPU (AoC uses all 4 cores BTW)...then the CPU is also important.

Cheers
 
Thanks for all of the replies! I appreciate the input and encourage more :)
 
openedge1 said:
I do not pretend to be a super geek or have the overall qualifications for it....but, I do know this..
There is a limit on the CPU vs GPU and that debate has been proven to me big time.

I originally had an E8400 OC'd to 3.2 with an ATI 4890.
In my game of choice (Age of Conan), I could get some decent framerates...nothing spectacular...say around the 80-100's..
I then upgraded to the i5-750, OC'd to 3.6, and started to already see improvements in smoothness and the capability to turn on some features I could not before (example go to 4x or 8x AA instead of the 2x on the e8400)

Then I bought the 5870 for use on the i5. My framerates increased exponentially.

(I could actually get anywhere between 120 all the way to 200FPS at 8x AA and Super Sample on)

Now , what I can gather are two things...

1. Yes, the GPU (original 4890) was limited by my CPU to do what it needed to do (memory may have helped here as well)
2. The CPU was also hurt by the GPU, as I reached a cap on the 4890. The 5870 has opened up more power. I have even continued to play and have switched to edge-detect and 24x samples of AA, and getting a beautiful 60FPS steady bench out of Age of Conan (1920x1080)

Now, take that as you will from a lowly gamer..but, this regular old joe has been ecstatic that he bought an i5 and the 5870.

All I can say is...if the game demands more power, any upgrade should suffice...but if the game likes the CPU as well as the GPU (AoC uses all 4 cores BTW)...then the CPU is also important.

Cheers
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E8400 @ 3.2 is not much of an overclock, I'm sure you would have seen an improvement in minimum/avg fps if you brought it up to 3.9-4.0. But yeah that E8400 -> i5-750 and 4890 -> 5870 should have definitely gotten you those massive gains.

And again at OP, I would really suggest overclocking and trying to get the last bit of life out of your processor. If you THEN don't get satisfactory results then it would be time to bite the upgrade bullet.
 
Shadowssong said:
E8400 @ 3.2 is not much of an overclock, I'm sure you would have seen an improvement in minimum/avg fps if you brought it up to 3.9-4.0. But yeah that E8400 -> i5-750 and 4890 -> 5870 should have definitely gotten you those massive gains.

And again at OP, I would really suggest overclocking and trying to get the last bit of life out of your processor. If you THEN don't get satisfactory results then it would be time to bite the upgrade bullet.
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I'm sorry this was not clear, and it is my fault.

The e8400 was overclocked to 3.2 on air (like I said..I am no expert and like modest gains with no extra cost of danger of loss)...
And the comparisons should have read that even at stock clock, the i5 already showed potential and was besting the e8400 performance wise. (BEFORE OC)

The fact I can go to 3.6 on air with no voltage changes on the i5 also is what I expect out of a great overclock, and meets my needs of enthusiastic OC'ing with zero outlay or danger..

So much so that finally I am debating buying a new heatsink to try for more Ghz.

Thanks
 
oddmanout said:
I upgraded from a 4850 to a 5850 and saw a massive improvement. Any E6000 and up will do fine with the 5800s.
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I see a noticeable improvement, from a 8800GT to a 5850. I am currently running my Q6600 on stock, though I should get around to overclocking it.
 
I'm not sure what people are looking for when they say 'bottleneck', it's very vague.

A strict definition could go either:

If you speed up the processor, you get negligible gains in performance therefore it's gpu bottlenecked.

OR

If you upgrade the gpu, you get negligible gains in performance therefore it's cpu bottlenecked.

In which case, the E6750 doesn't fall into either category. If you OC, you will of course see a performance increase. At the same time, you will also see (more significant) performance increase if you upgraded your gpu.

Obviously if you upgrade to a 5850/5870 you will want to OC the cpu, but in terms of... will my new 5800 perform like my 9800GT, no it will blow it out of the water.
 
Intel_Hydralisk said:
I'm not sure what people are looking for when they say 'bottleneck', it's very vague.

Obviously if you upgrade to a 5850/5870 you will want to OC the cpu, but in terms of... will my new 5800 perform like my 9800GT, no it will blow it out of the water.
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well, you interpreted my question perfectly. thanks for the reply!
 
rayz said:
awful? how so?
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eth3ton said:
Hey there Mr Wizard care to contribute to the thread... other than your self proclaimed elitism of course. You can keep that. :rolleyes:
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urgh, I've made this point a million times continues to get asked millions more.You simply cant make this generalization. Everyone wants to abstract their PC in this way, and it simply cant be done.

-edit-: Sorry. Physics exams make me grouchy (apparently... dude I spent 30 minutes trying to get a torque to show up negative and it kept showing up positive... turned out I simply wrote down a number out of order... COMON).

Whats the weakest component in your pc? Well we've got to be more specific --if your regularly stitching 16Mpixel RAW pictures together you want lots of fast ram running off really fast SSD's. Whats the weakest component in your PC for gaming? Well we still need to be more specific -- if your running physX its going to completly change the question from if your running counterstrike source. Whats the weakest component in your PC for such and such a list of games? Obviously this varies greatly with the content of the list, and the resolution to be played at, and the texture sizes, and the operating system, and the background aps...

You see my point? Theres so many variables --and even then, what are you after? One component might bring you up from an avg of 30 FPS to an avg of 50 FPS, where as another component might keep you at ~30 FPS (maybe bring you up to 35 FPS) but completly remove any FPS spike you were previously having. Another component might radically change load times, another might add networking stabillity...

Its just too general.

In the grand scheme of things, its absolutly a good idea to keep generational hardware with other hardware from the same generation. But if I had the OP's system and $300 to upgrade, I'd do what I did, buy an SSD.
 
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If you're going to run that CPU stock OP I'd just get a 4870 or 5770 and save the difference toward a better cpu/mobo platform. I'm sure you'd see nice framerates with a 5850 but I don't think it would justify the purchase price.
 
MetalX said:
If you're going to run that CPU stock OP I'd just get a 4870 or 5770 and save the difference toward a better cpu/mobo platform. I'm sure you'd see nice framerates with a 5850 but I don't think it would justify the purchase price.
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I like this suggestion the most, it seems levelheaded at least

honestly, and this is going on 3rd party benchmarks with numbers, not "I felt like it was improved with more CPU power", there is a very minor difference between the very best CPUs (say QX9775, i7 965, etc) and the very worst CPUs (Athlon BE, etc) in terms of gaming, say maybe 10-15%, when the difference in non-gaming applications (like photoshop, illustrator, video editing, etc) can easily get into the 200%+ range

the same is true of GPUs, the difference between the very best GPUs (say 5870 or GTX 285) and (with some general rules applied) worst GPUs (like HD 4350) in non-gaming applications, such as illustrator or video encoding, is more or less minor, again, like 10%, although in gaming, can be in the 200% range depending on what we're comparing/talking about

the single biggest upgrade you can make for JUST gaming performance, is a new graphics adapter, or a second/third graphics adapter, unless your CPU is just absurdly old (we're talking like pre-SSE3 old), this does not mean that a system with an E6600 or a Pentium D 965 (is it ironic that basically every top end CPU of the last 5 years has been "965" in some way or another?) and a 5870 will perform on par with a system with a Core i7 965 (ha!) and a 5870, but neither of them should have any issues running the same applications

if you have a fairly modern CPU (say within a generation or two of modern), things shouldn't be much of a problem at all, yeah you might miss 5-10 FPS (off of something like 70 or 80), but it isn't going to prevent the application from running

all of that said, I refer to the quoted post above, and suggest a 5770, mostly because its a cheaper alternative, and should be a nice performance upgrade in and of itself for your system
 
I am running an old E6400 Core 2 Duo at 3ghz, i get the same frame rate in dirt 2 give or take 1 or 2 frames if i run my processor @ 2 or 3ghz it makes no difference & also when i clock my 5850 up to 925mhz core and 1175mhz mem it shows no gains at all at 2 or 3ghz cpu speeds.

Would a Q6600 Core2 Quad make big a difference for me?
 
NIKO-007 said:
I am running an old E6400 Core 2 Duo at 3ghz, i get the same frame rate in dirt 2 give or take 1 or 2 frames if i run my processor @ 2 or 3ghz it makes no difference & also when i clock my 5850 up to 925mhz core and 1175mhz mem it shows no gains at all at 2 or 3ghz cpu speeds.

Would a Q6600 Core2 Quad make big a difference for me?
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Lots of people get their q6600s to 3.4+ but, it wouldn't be my first choice of a new 775 CPU. If you have one available for cheap, then by all means, its an improvement in every way, albeit not a huge one for gaming. But I would go with a q9550+ if you are going to upgrade, more value. Small upgrades make no sense to me, and a q9550 should easily get you to 3.8 or higher. That will bottleneck your 5850 less no matter what resolutions you are working at.
 
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