Intel i7 930 and GTX 900/1000 series - bottleneck?

[Bungah]

Hi guys, hope you can help with a simple question. I know very little about CPU's and I have had my current CPU since around about 2011 I believe, an i7 930 overclocked to 3.8Ghz.

I upgraded my GPU from a GTX 480 to a GTX 770 (2GB) about 1.5 years ago and now I am thinking about a further upgrade to either one of the higher 900 series or the GTX 1060.

Are you guys able to tell me if my CPU will bottleneck these cards with this CPU? Just let me know if I need to provide any further info. Thanks very much!

 

[Bungah]

Personally I think yes. would you noticed the difference much, probably not, if you can afford to upgrade do it, if not dont untill you can

Stelly

Thanks for the speedy reply! When you say would I notice the difference, do you mean would I notice the impact the bottleneck was having on the card as in it would likely be minimal?

 

[Bungah]

it shouldnt be a massive amount. it will still be a bit faster than you 770

Benchmarks for the 1060 in particular seem to suggest quite a large leap in FPS from a 770 - I wouldn't upgrade if my processor was gonna hamper that significantly

 

[Bungah]

At 1080p yes. At 1440p possibly. Above 1440p probably not.

You could get the Xeon x5650 as a cheap 50 quid upgrade that will remove any bottleneck at 1440p and up.

I'd be playing at 1080p - so not worth doing then?

I'm basically looking for a card to push me to max settings and 60fps instead of mostly High settings and 45-60fps in the more demanding titles.

 

[Bungah]

Thanks for all the advice guys. I had a look at some benchmarks of a similar CPU to mine with the new RX480 and the GTX1060 and both show a knock of about 10-20fps depending on game compared with a more recent CPU.

I don't have a huge budget, the 1060 is right at the top of it so getting extras on top unfortunately not an option.

I'm unsure what to do, it looks like I'd get a decent performance boost but it feels bad to upgrade into a known bottleneck. I know it's future proofing as I can upgrade processor down the line but not sure when that would be.

 

[Bungah]

What motherboard do you have, if it's compatible with a Xeon you could buy one of those off Ebay for around £50, one of those overclocked with an Nvidia 1060 will be a good step up.

List your entire spec here and we'll be able to help you best we can.

I'm not 100% on the motherboard, my system is one I bought from Overclockers actually in 2011, I *think* the mobo is a Gigabyte Ultra Durable UD3 of some description as that is what comes up on the splash screen when I boot the computer.

I'm not terribly tech savvy, as I said I bought this PC pre-built and simply plugged a new graphics card in as my only upgrade. Upgrading a CPU seems like a tougher job/easy thing to break what with having to reapply coolant stuff between it and the heatsink?

I have 6GB of RAM (no idea on details of speed/GDDR - but it'll be whatever was pretty decent in 2011? Lol)

And I have a pretty standard hard-drive, not an SSD.

I game at 1080p and will be continuing to do so for some time yet as I play via HDMI to my living room TV instead of a monitor and we aren't getting a 4K TV any time soon!

 

[Bungah]

I should maybe add that I generally don't buy second hand goods as I've been stung a couple of times before, so that will obviously have an impact on pricing here.

 

[Bungah]

I'd say the amd 480 or a gtx 1060 would give you a ok increase, I'd also look into what cpu cooler you have and if temps are fine o/c your 930 to 4 or 4.2 . Thats about your best bang for buck upgrade and you can always upgrade the rest of your pc at a later date in a year or two

I tried overclocking to 4.0 and it wasn't happy. I'm not sure what cooler I have, again it came with the PC pre-built. Annoyingly the system was meant to come 4.0 overclocked out of the box and I had to downclock to 3.8 to get it stable!

 

[Bungah]

For clarification, is my mobo above (Gigabyte Ultra Durable UD3) compatible for modern CPU's or would I require an upgrade on that front as well?

Perhaps it is best for me to wait and top up the budget a bit and make the whole upgrade at the same time. My GTX 770 is still pushing out good frame rates. It's just that difference between 45-60fps and rock solid 60fps and slight increase in graphics settings.

 

[Bungah]

your mobo wont take any modern cpus only 1366 socket cpu;s I'm using a 1060 with an i7 920 at 1080p not aware of a bottleneck, bf4 and doom all running on ultra with CPU going no higher than 65%. I would get the GPU, you must get an SSD it makes a hell of a diiference to the speed of your system even at SATA2 speeds. I would also consider sawpping the ram out, the fastest ddr3 your board supports. this may only be 1600 or 1866mhz. your board is triple channel, so you need to buy a dual kit and a single chip on its onw. not much drop in speed for Dual channel so you could just get an 8gb kit.

you will always be able to use the new GPU and SSD in a new system

This is interesting re no obvious bottleneck Kurgen, thanks. Thanks for the confirmation re my mobo too. Have you played anything more CPU intensive like Witcher 3/GTA V?

I read that SSD really only makes a difference to load speeds in terms of gaming, as in new levels, first loading your save game etc. and that it doesn't really translate into FPS? Is this true? If so, I'm not really bothered, everything loads and Windows runs at a pace I'm happy not spending money on.

I must confess I know absolutely nothing about RAM other than more is better and that the sticks have to match?? I thought that my VRAM would be a problem and not RAM in this instance - what's happening with RAM these days that its requiring more? Just bigger games?

 

[Bungah]

Thanks again for the advice and guidance all.

@chickadee - see that's weird - I downloaded MSI afterburner for the in game overlay yesterday and ran Witcher 3. CPU usage was at 65% maximum whereas GPU was at 99% at all times. Why would yours be 100% CPU and mine not?

Surely the above means I'm GPU limited and not CPU?

 

[Bungah]

Hmmm, thanks for the advice lads. I do think upgrading the GPU, seeing how things are then considering a cheap CPU upgrade is probably the best way forward.

To just go back to something earlier in the thread, almost everyone has recommended a Xeon x5650 but one person mentioned that my motherboard might not support it. I've looked into my mobo in more detail and it is a Gigabyte Ultra Durable 3 X58A-UD3R. Is anyone able to tell me if it will be compatible with a Xeon x5650? Thanks again guys, been a big help so far.

EDIT: Googling seems to reveal that whilst not expressly supported, some users have found that a Xeon 5650 does indeed run on the above motherboard?

 

[Bungah]

I run a 5650 on that motherboard. You just need to find out the (Rev no) to flash to the appropriate version needed to support six core processors.
The revision number can be located on the bottom left hand corner of your motherboard.
http://uk.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3103#ov

One of these sounds like your board you mentioned. I run mine on on rev 1.6 flashed to Bios version FF. I couldn't do any later version because it wants you to flash through windows which i wasn't willing to do.

Wow okay, thanks for the information - good to hear somebody who has actually done it on my board!

I have no idea about flashing Bios, is it a difficult task? What is the problem with flashing through Windows, just googled and it seemed the simplest way to do it.

 

[Bungah]

I've done a bit more research and it seems that at 1080p a CPU bottleneck will be much more noticeable because an upgraded GPU will be capable of drawing frames much faster at the lower resolution than say 4K, and the old CPU can't keep up (i.e. bottleneck).

With me not having a higher resolution monitor, is it possible to therefore use Nvidia's DSR technology to DSR a much higher resolution, intentionally alleviating a CPU bottleneck whilst actually improving image quality? It sounds like a win-win on paper but maybe it wouldn't work like this, am I just theorycrafting now in desperation? Lol.

 

[Bungah]

Hi

Sorry if my last post confused - there will be a bottleneck at the CPU, but it'll just limit you getting 100% out of the card. But it will still be a huge upgrade and one well worth doing...

e.g. upgrade 770 to 1060 without bottleneck might be 1.5x faster. With bottleneck maybe it's 1.2x faster. I made the numbers up but you get the idea

Thanks for clarifying, makes total sense.

I've found an article that replicates my situation fairly well (http://www.hardwareunboxed.com/gtx-1060-vs-rx-480-in-6-year-old-amd-and-intel-computers)

On an old i5 vs a newer processor, there's gains on average of about 20fps seemingly, which is pretty considerable.

I think my plan is to get a GTX 1060, I'd love a 1070 ideally but it's just too far out of budget, especially if I need a CPU upgrade as well. I can then sit on the 1060 and try it out for a bit and see if my CPU is indeed getting rekt quite badly, if the performance is what I want then great, but if not, then I can look into get Xeon 5650 everyone seems to recommend.

 

[Bungah]

I think I know what needs to be done; upgrade CPU, upgrade GPU, add more RAM and I'll be flying again. GPU and RAM I have experience with and is like playing with Lego but replacing a CPU what with removing the heat sink, reapplying paste and reseating etc scares the hell out of me! I think the fear is holding me back in that regard.

I'd happily pay a techy a tenner or something to do it for me but even that scares me lol.