Is my CPU bottlenecking my GTX680

[horrorxpunk]

Hey there guys I have a Crosshair formula V with a FX8150 bulldozer I bought last october. I just upgraded from a GTX580 to an Asus GTX680 DirectCU II TOP. It's a stonking card but I don't know if I am getting the full performance out of it; considering the margin which intel lead by; and by benchmark comparisons. Is the FX8150 really enough to harness the full power of the GTX680 especially as I am looking at jumping from the 1201mhz core boost to 1480mhz core boost clock.

 

[horrorxpunk]

I am overclocking the 680 based on the "boost clock" so the gpu's default "boost clock" is set to 1201mhz and I will be pushing it to around ~1450mhz mark hopefully. I have run the Nvidia New Dawn benchmark aswell as Unigine Heaven and the card seems to be running at upto 99% and I am using MSI Afterburner to monitor the card.

 

[horrorxpunk]

I don't think you'll see north of 1300 mhz on that 680 tbh
/offtopic

It's an Asus DirectCU II TOP it reaches 1218mhz on the default clock. An adjustment of 150mhz core and 500 mhz memory should be a piece of cake I could manage that a breeze on my GTX580 I had that clocked at 952mhz with 4674mhz memory.

 

[horrorxpunk]

Custom bench doesn't tell you anything useful that would identify CPU bottleneck under actual gaming environment. I'm not sure about New Dawn, but for Heaven it is pretty much a pure graphic stress test, which even some like an old Core2Duo can most likely max out the GPU usage on the GTX680.

Getting 99% GPU usage on Heaven Bench that's not CPU dependent at all doesn't even remotely mean you would get the same usage on games. You need to run some actual games and look at GPU usage to see if there's huge dips.

The games you play is also an important factor, as some games is much more CPU demanding than your everyday bread and butter FPS games that would use 4 cores or more. For example I recently started playing World vs World on Guild Wars 2, and with 60-100 people duking it out at each other plus the rendering of world environment...even with my i5 2500K overclocked to 4.5GHz, it was bottlenecking my 5850 and with frame rate dropped to around 30fps and GPU usage down to 50%. Bulldozer or PD would probably be crying at this situation with the frame rate dropped down to around 10-15fps and GPU usage down to around 25%, considering Guild Wars 2 only usage up to 3 threads max.

I am having the same problems with Guild Wars 2; I regularly find whatever graphics card I am using the FPS on Guild Wars 2 in player heavy areas such as lion's arch is dipping up and down greatly; but in usual areas it will run smoothly at 60fps must be very CPU intensive.

 

[horrorxpunk]

Good luck with that

Why so much doubt from you guys

This is the card by the way; will post results and benchmarks.

http://www.asus.com/Graphics_Cards/NVIDIA_Series/GTX680DC2T2GD5/

 

[horrorxpunk]

Right your on; will start burn-in and stress testing when I get back from work at midnight and will upload photos so y'all can see some overkill from the GTX680

 

[horrorxpunk]

http://postimage.org/image/3uw88uqat/

Gentlemen start your engines off to a good start.

 

[horrorxpunk]

Gosh and the power slider is still on 100% thats a golden chip you have there sir.

At default clock it rarely sees sights past 70% and it will be running at 1218mhz I am going to jump it up to 159% and bring it down anyway I have not started benching and burn-in yet as I had to run out to work. I did get 3D Mark 11 running at 1300mhz though.

 

[horrorxpunk]

Post your results in gregsters 3dmark11 thread and see how you compare. You should be able to beat my GTX 680 easy, the highest it will clock is 1215mhz and 7004mhz memory.

Awesome I will move this onto that thread and we can return to the original post. So it looks like my 8150 will not hold the full potential of the GTX680 so I am looking at Sandy-bridge-E / Ivybridge / Ivybridge-E. Price is not an issue although I cannot justify £800 on the 3960X what's the best CPU to go for. Sandy-bridge-E / Ivybridge. I believe Intel 2011 socket will support Ivybridge-E?

 

[horrorxpunk]

+1

Having looked about, your expectations of 1400+ is a little OTT unless you put the card under water and use a custom BIOS with ABX or some other form of volting tool.

OP. If you have BF3, use this as a test. If @ 1080P multi player you are seeing your CPU above 80% I believe, this will cause your GPU to slow down.

Actually I don't think the CPU barely goes over 50% with the FX8150 in most games as they are not optimized for 8 - core threading however I am now using Windows 8 which is supposedly more optimized - it's a pretty clean and fast OS bar metro UI ( which is still useful ) and essentially needs to be customised with the classicstartmenu tool. Anyway looking forward to get home from work tonight and getting started.

 

[horrorxpunk]

well I only had 3DMark Vantage before I have bought 3DMark11 on steam I am always losing my keys so I will upload my results tonight and share them with you guys

 

[horrorxpunk]

Just run the free version bud. No need to pay for it I only add the P scores and not X scores.

I like having it with steam it makes me feel e-safe haha. No the steam 3dmark11 merge accounts with my 3dmark vantage so I am happy with that. I got a total clock of 1240mhz at stock voltage and I have not seen anything over 70 degrees while stress testing with fur-mark with high clocks and high voltages. just benchmarking a bit at a time, I have had trouble with high clocks in BF3 before though where I had a GTX580 @ 952mhz everything else would run fine but BF3 would crash after around 15 - 20 minutes.

 

[horrorxpunk]

I have been benching the GTX680 all night my physics score kept dropping so I was getting lower marks but I was getting higher and higher graphics scores. I managed a score of 11497. Which is a massive improvement over the default 11266. My GTX580 only got 7308 @ 952mhz core clock. Sandybridge-E sounds the way to go as the motherboards will be compatible with Ivybridge-E which will be coming out Q3 next year Haswell looks set to be an amazing chip I will probably save for the highest spec chip which is probably around £800.

GTX680
http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/4830957

GTX580

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/2916647

All the SB-E CPUs do in 3dmark11 is push the physics and combined part of the score up. A better guide to use is the graphics score.

This sounds good though physics is become a more and more important part of the way games work; this isn't just a bench system it's my gaming PC. I am very dedicated too it and I am a massive build enthusiast. I'm not about having all that power for the sake of it their is so much I can do to utilize it.

 

[horrorxpunk]

holy crap that's nice I am not managing to hit those clocks though; I can get high clocks but I am having problem with oscillation and max boost clocks ( not the normal BC ) but at a certain level it gives out and my TDP and GPU Usage and temperatures are fine and it doesn't seem to be anything to do with the voltage either so I am a bit stuck. I can get 1306mhz but I am getting artifacts; my tempratures are fine and my TDP is set to `159% although I have my voltage at absolute maximum.

 

[horrorxpunk]

I have very little knowledge on piledriver but from what I have read, it still flass short of a 2500K (which is old now).

Whilst I would say you are fine with your CPU now, higher resoloutions and more demanding future games could see your GPU bottlnecking but don't change out till you need to/want to.

As I say I am mosly waiting on the Intel Haswell chip as I now have the mone tha I am working full-time ( almost non-stop ) for a broadband company who pay very well . I will see which motherboards Asus bring out for the Haswell and look into buying on of those chips. I am unlikely to go over a 1080p resolution I never use monitors bigger than 24" otherwise I have trouble seeing as I am sat quite close. GTX680 is flawing everything on full but at 1266mhz core clock is giving me nearly 5fps more in some cases which I like; I am looking at a minor boost clock increase and see what I can push the memory clocks too a little improvement would still be nice. I think I would have been better off not getting the ASUS TOP. I would have probably got a higher clock speed with the standard DirectCUII model. I get a max clock of 1280mhz and it starts oscillating between that and 1258mhz and this is at full gpu usage and 50 degrees temperature and only 90% TDP. I am baffled any advice?

 

[horrorxpunk]

I think your clocks are pretty standard and are infact higher than a few others I have seen. My score was that high because of over volting and the LTG will not throttle back over 70C.

I have seen some cards bomb out at 1230Mhz, so yours at 50MHhz higher is very decent.

I can hit 1306mhz but I start getting artifacts I am not getting bad crashes. I am finding voltage is not making a big difference but the right voltage can help stop the oscillation. It's not that I can't go higher than 1280mhz it's that the max clock fails and the graphics card drops down. It shouldn't do though as it hasn't even reached 100% TDP, it's still at 60 degrees and full gpu usage. I cannot understand the problem but I actually think it could just be at the graphics cards peak or it is a problem with the power supply; I am only using an XFX Core Edition 650 w; I am looking at switching to modular.

 

[horrorxpunk]

I think your clocks are pretty standard and are infact higher than a few others I have seen. My score was that high because of over volting and the LTG will not throttle back over 70C.

I have seen some cards bomb out at 1230Mhz, so yours at 50MHhz higher is very decent.

Clocking was a bit of a fail on the core clock I could get a max boost of 1267 mhz stable with a memory clock of 7602 mhz which was impressive. Overclocking the memory core on it's own I was able to increase the offset by an amazing 900mhz / 7814 mhz effective. I ran multiple benchmarks; heaven a few times and survived through 3D Mark 11. Yay. I sat down and used furmark at 228 x 228 resolution with 8x MSAA to simulate the heat generated by a demanding game and set my fans accordingly. I launched up the new Crysis 3 Alpha and played for a good 15 minutes; suddenly the game crashed and now the clocks won't stabilise at all above the default. furgh. Any advice? Funnily enough if I increase the fan speed to 85% it will stabilise. I only needed a fan speed of 45% to keep the temperature below 69 degrees but some reason everything is just locking up now. I am using EVGA Precision-X as it afterburner will not set the voltage at max constantly during heavy load and I have had major crashes with GPU Tweak in the past; I have always been able to get higher clocks with ASUS Smart Doctor though.


7814mhz 3D Mark 11 no artifacts
http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/4846370

1267mhz Max Boost / 7602mhz Memory
http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/4847268