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When do you become bottlenecked?

J

jackdhammer

n00b
Joined
Jun 17, 2004
Messages
25
My question is, when do you become bottlenecked by the rest of your system?

I have a i7 920 slightly OCd (EVGA dummy OC)
6GB of DDR3 PC3 12800

I currently have a 5870 Vapor-x and wanted to add another for crossfire.
I was wondering though if I would see significant results or if I would be bottlenecked by the rest of my system?
I mostly game and do a fair amount of video creation with Sony Vegas 9

Any insight is appreciated

Thanks!
 
Nice question - I'm really interested in this too :)

And if it's not too rude to ask - but what if the same setup is going for trifire 5870 vapor-x?
 
depends on your resolution. If you are running a high resolution (read 1920x1200 or greater) then your CPU is not your bottleneck. An I7-920 is hardly a bottleneck anyway. Head over to the Processor subforum and read up on overclocking - You can typically overclock I7-920 chips quite well and eliminate any feasible bottleneck.
 
I've always been semi confused by people who are so concerned with bottlenecking. The fact is that every system is bottlenecked in theory. There is no perfect system where it will never bottleneck. All hardware works at different speeds.

I could see if one piece of hardware is lagging behind others in age or performance than you should be worried. I also see the want to get the most out of your system. But running a current gen, high end cpu, gpu and a decent amount of RAM I don't think you need to worry about a bottleneck until you start to notice performance issues. You will drive yourself crazy trying to find a bottleneck because it's always there in one way or another. Once you get your cpu to not be a bottleneck then your gpu will be, then you'll need more ram, then a SSD raid setup, then a second gpu for crossfire, then by this time you should upgrade your cpu, then it starts all over again.

Pretty much the only way to prevent a bottleneck is to constantly upgrade to the very top of the line hardware as soon as it's released and then overclock it all. As long as you have a routine upgrading plan in place you should be fine. Just don't let any of your components get too old.
 
bigbadgreen said:
Pretty much the only way to prevent a bottleneck is to constantly upgrade to the very top of the line hardware as soon as it's released and then overclock it all. As long as you have a routine upgrading plan in place you should be fine. Just don't let any of your components get too old.
Click to expand...

Well, true.. I try to keep my system balanced and I think that's what most people are looking for when they look for bottlenecks. Obviously if you keep reexamining your PC for bottlenecks over and over you'll be in an infinite loop :) But you don't want 1 slow part dragging down the whole thing either. I try to find the CPU that caps out around where my GPU does so I don't waste money on either based on what I can afford.

If you had $500 to spend you wouldn't really want to buy a 5870 and an Athlon II 240 instead of a 5850 and a i5-750. The Athlon II 240 would be a 'bottleneck' and you would be wasting the performance of the 5870. The 5850 and i5-750 are pretty balanced for each other and would be a better way to spend the $500.

It is a relevant question for the OP because it can take a hefty CPU to push a 2nd 5870. I wouldn't bother on any C2D according to the xbitlabs chart but i7 920 is fine.
 
Thanks for all the reply's, they really helped.
It looks like I'll be adding that second 5870 after all :)

Now if only newegg would stop raping the price so I don't have to go through zipzoomfly :(
 
I have a friend who once had a monkey, it's one of those small faced one with big eyes who are always pissed off.

One day he got a 2 litre pop bottle and put a peanut in it. The monkey looks at it, dips his hand into the bottle, grabs the peanut, but couldn't get his hand out of the bottle because now the hand is clenching the peanut in a fist. It took the monkey a full two-hour to realize that he could not defy the laws of physics. So what does the monkey do? He hauls around the bottle, with the peanut still in his hand, for the rest of the day.

That's called bottlenecked.

Bah, looking at your system spec, and like the rest of the hard members said, it is hard to determine where the actual bottleneck will come from. Depends on the use, resolution and the type of work you'll be doing. If you are planning to do some video editing I can tell you that the biggest bottleneck right there will be your storage system. Either get a striped RAID going or get a couple of SSDs.
 
You shouldn't even worry about CPU bottlenecking unless you're just wanting to benchmark things. As far as real world gaming is concerned, if you're only goal is to get 60fps, then you could be gaming on a Core2Duo from several years ago and not be bottlenecked in anything outside of the CPU hungry RTS games like SupCom or Dawn of War 2.

There is some Xbit Labs article floating about somewhere where they took a load of CPUs and ran a 5870 and 5870 crossfire and tested 15 games. The minimum framerate was over 60 in almost every situation, even on Core2Duos running at stock from several years ago. The two games that CPU limited below 60 were the ones mentioned above.
 
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