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CPU bottlenecking?

Orch

Orch

Orch

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Joined
11 Apr 2013
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Nr Salisbury
I'm a bit of noob so excuse me if I'm asking a stupid question.

My humble little rig does me quite well, but you know how it is, we always want more :D Was experimenting last night as noticed that the FPS difference on Crysis 2, running the maldohd4.0 mod, between min and max graphics settings was not much at all, maybe 10FPS at highest. I noticed similar with BF3 a while ago.

Does this mean my CPU is bottle necking? It's only a little FX4100 so I know it's not great.

Also, and I appreciate this might be difficult to answer unless someone has tried it specifically, but if I upgraded to a Haswell i5 for example, would I see some extra performance unlocked from my 7850?

The 7850 is OC'd to 1200/5600 by the way if that makes any difference.
 
which rev is your gigbyte board ? (hopefully 3,1 better vrms)
An overclocked 7850 at those clocks you have is right on the doorstep of a 800mhz 7950.
I'd say get hold of a fx6300/6350, if you have a 4+1 vrm board.
 
Simple answer would be YES. You would see much higher frame rate upgrading to an overclocked i5 if you were gaming on high/mix of high and ultra (rather than everything on Ultra and 4xAA on BF3- which is more demanding than the 7850 is meant for).

However, if you already got a AM3+ board that support the Piledriver FX CPUs, it would be cheaper to just drop a FX-8320 onto your board instead of changing board and grabbing a Intel CPU.

It won't make much difference comparing to what you currently using in games that use 4 cores or less, but in games that use more than 4 cores (i.e. BF), you should see some reasonable improvement.
 
Thanks for the answers, very helpful.

Not sure which rev, will have to check the box when I get home later.

Dropping a 6300 or 8320 would be a damn site cheaper than jumping over to intel. The games I play are mainly big name FPS as well, like BF3, BF4 when it gets here, Crysis etc so perhaps more cores would make sense?

I'm thinking dropping one of these in now or soonish, then upgrading mobo and GPU next year might be a good? Then I can decide whether to get another 7850 and crossfire, or just go for a better single GPU.
 
I feel that a 4100 would be a bottleneck. First person shooters are often GPU bound though so thankfully you should not need to invest in an expensive CPU to handle these games well. Piledriver is a respectable improvement over Bulldozer and even dropping in a 6 core will give you the Piledriver improvements and an extra 2 cores, which BF3 can use.

In my opinion the best cost effective thing to do is get a 6 core or 8 core if your motherboard supports them (might want to google to see if others are using them with the motherboard)
 
Orch said:
Thanks for the answers, very helpful.

Not sure which rev, will have to check the box when I get home later.

Dropping a 6300 or 8320 would be a damn site cheaper than jumping over to intel. The games I play are mainly big name FPS as well, like BF3, BF4 when it gets here, Crysis etc so perhaps more cores would make sense?

I'm thinking dropping one of these in now or soonish, then upgrading mobo and GPU next year might be a good? Then I can decide whether to get another 7850 and crossfire, or just go for a better single GPU.
Click to expand...

That opens a whole other adventure...

Upgrading to a 6300 will release the bottleneck on your 7850.

Though going 7850 Xfire will mean you need atleast a 8320 overclocked to release the bottleneck..

Though unless you have a 990X or 970 board (to cope with overclocking the 8320) that's not a possibility so i assume you'd have to upgrade your motherboard too..

Which means you would be

Buying a 8320 + New motherboard

So that brings it more to intel price range which (if you did want to switch) becomes a viable option..
 
Ha, beaten to it!

Yeh I think 8320 & new board is the best idea. Then it leaves my options open GPU wise going forward.
 
Ah right. Just make sure you don't get a cheaper board than the one above, as they don't work properly with the 8320.
 
Yeh I was looking through them earlier and realised I know sod all about mobos. I'll be back to ask advice on that when the funds are ready. Thanks again.
 
Orch said:
Hmm, from what I tell the only Vishera chip supported is the fx8300 and that's a bit old now isn't it?

http://www.cpu-upgrade.com/mb-Gigabyte/GA-78LMT-S2P(rev._3.1).html

Looks like a new board might be on the cards sooner rather than later then.
Click to expand...
Ah if that's your board, then yea the FX-8300 with the 95W TDP is probably the highest CPU you could get. From the looks of it the board's VRM is not good enough to handle the TDP 125W FX8320 and FX8350, so that's why they ain't listed in the support list. However, I don't think there's any retailer selling the 95W FX8300 in the UK. There are some people selling it on the famous auction site, but it's at £135.

Also, I don't think the 95W TDP FX8300 will overclocked as high as the 125W TDP FX8320/8350.
 
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Definitely get the 8320 if your not looking to spend a lot, but just so you know, i upgraded from a FX4100 @4.8 to a 4770K @4.6 and the performance difference has been absolutely incredible.
I ran a highly overclocked gigabyte 7970 Ghz edition when i had the fx and while for the most part games ran fine, it always felt like it wasn't able to stretch it's legs.
I get higher fps now than i ever did with my old system.
Best of luck in what ever you get pal.:)
 
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