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Bottleneck?

Thanks people ;)

SouthEastBlue said:
The older AMD chips are pretty weak for gaming, you would probably see a nice increase from a cheaper Athlon II X3 or X4, or ideally a Phenom II X3 or X4.
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Mmm, I was thinking a Phenom II X2 550 off member's market, not sure though.

Paracelsus said:
No, I'm using a 4200+ and my 8800GTX is the bottleneck in games. Used to run it at 5000+ speeds as well but saw no benefit so left it stock for Cool n Quiet.
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Doesn't sound right to me, the 4200+ is aging a bit and the 8800GTX is still up there in the mid-high end cards. There's more to it than speeds too, I never used to see any noticeable FPS increase from CPU overclocking ;S
 
spleenharvester said:
Doesn't sound right to me, the 4200+ is aging a bit and the 8800GTX is still up there in the mid-high end cards. There's more to it than speeds too, I never used to see any noticeable FPS increase from CPU overclocking ;S
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Sure the 8800GTX still kicks ass, tears through xbox ports etc, but it doesn't cut it for maxing out the likes of Crysis/Stalker COP etc. In these games dropping graphic details = more FPS hence the CPU is not the bottleneck.
Hell it's even the bottleneck in HL2: Lost Coast for me. CS:S scaled pretty much linearly with increased CPU/RAM speed, so an obvious case of CPU bottlenecking - yet LC gained barely a frame or two - and that's running at ~90fps already!

As for the 4200+ aging...well technically of course, newer stuff has come out - but just because there is newer stuff doesn't mean you need it! AMD/Intel would love to have you believe that you need their latest many-core 3ghz+ designs to play games well but it simply isn't the case.

I've yet to play one, but perhaps there are the odd games that need a quad to hit ~60fps...you'll know if you play one because they will run like crap even on low graphic detail, then it's time to upgrade if you really like the game I suppose :p

My advice is don't listen to anyone else, pick a game you want to play and see if the FPS drops as you increase detail. If it does - GPU is bottleneck, if not, CPU!
 
pswfps said:
Have you tried a modest overclock on the 5000+ to see if that helps any?
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Tried it, this chip's hopeless :p

Paracelsus said:
Sure the 8800GTX still kicks ass, tears through xbox ports etc, but it doesn't cut it for maxing out the likes of Crysis/Stalker COP etc. In these games dropping graphic details = more FPS hence the CPU is not the bottleneck.
Hell it's even the bottleneck in HL2: Lost Coast for me. CS:S scaled pretty much linearly with increased CPU/RAM speed, so an obvious case of CPU bottlenecking - yet LC gained barely a frame or two - and that's running at ~90fps already!

As for the 4200+ aging...well technically of course, newer stuff has come out - but just because there is newer stuff doesn't mean you need it! AMD/Intel would love to have you believe that you need their latest many-core 3ghz+ designs to play games well but it simply isn't the case.

I've yet to play one, but perhaps there are the odd games that need a quad to hit ~60fps...you'll know if you play one because they will run like crap even on low graphic detail, then it's time to upgrade if you really like the game I suppose :p

My advice is don't listen to anyone else, pick a game you want to play and see if the FPS drops as you increase detail. If it does - GPU is bottleneck, if not, CPU!
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Woah, looks like you know a lot more than I do :p I get what you mean now - Just tried Far Cry 2, the difference between high and ultra high settings is ~1fps. No joke. Guessing it's a new CPU then?

Would a Phenom II X2 550 cut it? Can't unlock on my aging AM2+ motherboard but it's the best I can get without breaking the bank.
 
spleenharvester said:
Woah, looks like you know a lot more than I do :p I get what you mean now - Just tried Far Cry 2, the difference between high and ultra high settings is ~1fps. No joke. Guessing it's a new CPU then?

Would a Phenom II X2 550 cut it? Can't unlock on my aging AM2+ motherboard but it's the best I can get without breaking the bank.
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You'd get a somewhat better architecture there and more clockspeed, but if you can't unlock it (and it's risky anyway) I would question the value for money...you're just getting a slightly faster dual core. They're about £70 right - for £76 ish you could get this, 3ghz quad core. Great value there and you won't be needing more than 4 cores for games for a long time....
 
Go straight for a quad, I've seen 2nd hand Athlon II X4's go for prob about £50 if you look around or you can buy a brand new one for under £70 delivered, again if you look around.

Over the last year I noticed a handful of the games I was playing bogging down on my E5200 even if I overclocked it to 3.8Ghz, and I think this was simply from only having 2 cores. Didn't seem to matter if the settings were lowered or not, hence I recently ordered a cheap upgrade (£140 for X4 cpu, DDR3 ram, and 770 chipset mobo) which should come today! :cool:
 
It's probably your RAM or CPU/NB that's holding back your OC. Maybe try dropping them down on the multipliers to see if you can OC the cores higher?
 
Someone suggested I buy a new HDD as it sounds like issues with my old slow WD1600AAJS, I only just realised how slow it really is (50mb/s average compared with 134mb/s of a Spinpoint F3). So I guess it's upgrade time. Is it worth me getting a Spinpoint F4 320GB?

Paracelsus said:
You'd get a somewhat better architecture there and more clockspeed, but if you can't unlock it (and it's risky anyway) I would question the value for money...you're just getting a slightly faster dual core. They're about £70 right - for £76 ish you could get this, 3ghz quad core. Great value there and you won't be needing more than 4 cores for games for a long time....
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That's true, might try MM - seen X2 550+'s go for £38. Since my 5000+ sells for £30 roughly I might give it a shot.

SouthEastBlue said:
Go straight for a quad, I've seen 2nd hand Athlon II X4's go for prob about £50 if you look around or you can buy a brand new one for under £70 delivered, again if you look around.

Over the last year I noticed a handful of the games I was playing bogging down on my E5200 even if I overclocked it to 3.8Ghz, and I think this was simply from only having 2 cores. Didn't seem to matter if the settings were lowered or not, hence I recently ordered a cheap upgrade (£140 for X4 cpu, DDR3 ram, and 770 chipset mobo) which should come today! :cool:
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Problem is, my board does not support AMD3 CPUs officially... only in a beta BIOS, and the only CPU confirmed working stabley (to my knowledge) is the 550 BE. :(

pswfps said:
It's probably your RAM or CPU/NB that's holding back your OC. Maybe try dropping them down on the multipliers to see if you can OC the cores higher?
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I've tried everything, even borrowed decent RAM off a mate, the chip's impossible to work with lol.
 
Not sure why you would want to buy a hard drive that is so small. The difference in price between a 1TB and a 320 GB drive is rather small.

And your impossible CPU, sadly that does happen. But it could be many other things too, motherboards just like CPU's are not all created equal. :(
 
Hmmm, that's true, but I barely use 120gb of my 160gb drive as it is. Would I see higher performance if I bought a 1TB version 'cause of there being less crud on it?

EDIT: Between these three drives:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-342-WD&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=940 - WD Black 640gb
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-101-SA&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=768 - Samsung F4 320gb
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-081-SA&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=940 - Samsung F3 500gb

I'm thinking the Caviar Black atm as the access time is much lower at the cost of slightly lower read/write throughput. Better for gaming?
 
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Games shouldn't be hitting the hard drive with 3GB RAM unless they're badly coded. And unless you get a 10000rpm drive or SSD the access times won't get much better with a new drive, they are that much slower than RAM you'll still notice the stuttering.
 
Ah right, I'm not really sure what to do then :confused:

If anything I just wanna smoothen out all the laggyness/stuttering when I move the cursor, but I just have no idea where to start. In perfmon I see heavy CPU spikes but that's about it.
 
What res do you game at and what kind of games?

When you say laggyness/stuttering it could be a few things, hard to know for sure without seeing it. Short freezes and bad stuttering when moving into new areas for example says hard-drive thrashing is going on so more RAM would solve it, more consistent laggyness in terms of low FPS says GPU, but it could also be a driver issue!

I will say with confidence though that a 2.6ghz X2 would not cause stuttering on it's own, based on my experience playing demanding games on my 2.2ghz X2. In games like STALKER I get stuttering due to the game hitting the hard drive mid-level to load stuff - you can tell as it has a floppy disc icon that appears in the corner of the screen. Things like Crysis just generally low FPS due to GPU limitation, also with the odd hard-drive hits (though nowhere near as bad as STALKER).
 
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