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Bottlenecking a Titan

LePhuronn

LePhuronn

LePhuronn

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Joined
26 Sep 2010
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Stoke-on-Trent
Don't ask me how I did it, but I accidentally bought a Titan from our "favourite" auction site (60 hours awake while the other half was in hospital fries your brain). Thing is my rig was never intended to be a gaming platform so it's underspecced for carrying a Titan.

I'm 95% sure I'll keep the Titan as an investment for the new build (hopefully) coming later in the year, but for now how much am I gonna bottleneck the poor thing?

Currently running a H67 Mini-ITX board with a Sandy Bridge Pentium G850. So that's PCI-E 2.0 and a 2.9GHz dual core with no Hyperthreading. Now I'm thinking the obvious hampering won't be too much of an issue because it'll only be driving one of my 1080p screens so it's hardly a taxing workload.

But before I make additional investment in getting the PSU up-to-scratch and (possibly) a bigger SSD for the games, I wanted to ask if this simple system is going to fair well enough for now, or if I should just cut my losses and offer the Titan a more deserving home.

Cheers.
 
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Your CPU will be a ridiculous bottleneck, like, truly ridiculous.
A G850 is a decent CPU for very budget end gaming, but it'll bottleneck a 7850 quite easily, the Titan is a beast in comparison.

By the time you actually invest into new components, we could be within spitting distance of the next die shrink where Titan's performance will make its name seem silly.

Unless of course you spent like nothing on it :p
 
It wasn't nothing, but it was cheaper than a 780 and it's only 5 months old.

I think I'll go borrow a PSU and fire it up and see what happens.
 
LePhuronn said:
It wasn't nothing, but it was cheaper than a 780 and it's only 5 months old.

I think I'll go borrow a PSU and fire it up and see what happens.
Click to expand...

Give it a spin, it won't be any worse than anything else you could put in there.

Make sure you max the game settings that should help.
 
Game collection is a little thin because, as I said, she was never supposed to be a gaming rig. Any suggestions on what I can demo/borrow to unleash the Titan and destroy the Pentium?

I'm thinking Metro 2033, Crysis 1/2/Far Cry 3, modded Skyrim are chunky enough to ramp up. Also Hitman Absolution is a GPU killer apparently.
 
Go for Heaven 4.0 fully maxed out.
Monitor GPU usage.

That's about as intensive as you can get.

Skyrim would be a MASSIVE CPU bottleneck.
 
Thanks all for the input, and crippling the Pentium I guess is part of the test.

Will keep you posted, and if I do keep the Titan I may have a build log coming, assuming I don't get banned because there's already a Corsair H60 involved.
 
Martini1991 said:
Go for Heaven 4.0 fully maxed out.
Monitor GPU usage.

That's about as intensive as you can get.

Skyrim would be a MASSIVE CPU bottleneck.
Click to expand...

Just ran this with my CPU @2.8

Single Titan @stock

Heaven 4 full maxed out 1080p

tgq8.jpg

Not a bad score

It should give the OP an idea how his CPU copes with the Titan.
 
LePhuronn said:
lol thanks Kaapstad, but that's a wonderful Sandy E you got there :p
Click to expand...

I only posted it to use as a guide, I think you may be surprised how your CPU performs with some things like Heaven 4 which does not use many threads.

Good luck with the testing and I hope all goes well.:)
 
Is that your 4 Titans :p?
And 2 Cores, 2 threads.

Your cache will also make a decent difference over the pentium.
But yeah, Heaven's the most intensive thing I could possibly think of.

Didn't realise it was that GPU limited to be honest, gaming you'd probably be lucky to max about 50% of Titan.
 
Martini1991 said:
Is that your 4 Titans :p?
And 2 Cores, 2 threads.

Your cache will also make a decent difference over the pentium.
But yeah, Heaven's the most intensive thing I could possibly think of.

Didn't realise it was that GPU limited to be honest, gaming you'd probably be lucky to max about 50% of Titan.
Click to expand...

Here is the last one.:)

Single Titan @stock
3930k @2.8
Using 2 cores
Hyperthreading off

olzm.jpg


2i9s.jpg

I am just off now to put my 3930k back together lol.:D
 
Thanks Kaap for the benches.

My results are quite similar. Heaven comes out at 58fps, Valley at 67fps. Max on both was about 90, and watching both play through I was sticking around the 60fps most of the time.

Max cranked settings on both.

Overall I don't think it's too bad all things considered. I may jump on a i5 2500 (not K) and see how the extra 2 cores help out, but to be honest some of the work I've been doing recently would benefit from a quad anyway.

Not bad, not bad at all methinks.
 
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