Measuring bottleneck

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I have my old i7 920 and i7 930 and want to know where a bottleneck would occur with my systems using gtx 970's as the gpu .. is it possible to tell where it would be in games considering i want to move up to a minimum of 2560x1440 on two new monitors. Will it be mobo, memory, cpu or gpu ?? is there software that can determine this?
 
How many 970's? 2? 3? 4?

Is that 2560x1440 split across two monitors, or 2560x1440 on each monitor (5120x1440)?

There's no way to know a priori, but if you fire some games up you can see the CPU vs GPU usage, ideally the latter will be near 100% and the former low. You can also get some idea by looking at frame time variance (lots of spikes and dips suggest CPU bottleneck).

5120x1440 is massive though and I'm pretty sure you'll be GPU limited. Get the 920 overclocked a bit.
 
Depends on if your i7 920/930 is overclocked to 4.00GHz or not.

If you have overclocked the CPU, then at 2560 res the 970 SHOULD be the bottleneck (and the 3.5GB vram itself can be a bottleneck for the 970 for this res and may cause stuttering).

But there are games there would be CPU bottleneck, such as mmos...like Guild Wars 2 for example. Most games in general that doesn't have a few dozens of players running around would be more likely to be GPU bottlenecked than CPU.
 
Right here is the plan. I'm not going to upgrade anything for either system now and try and overclock both the 920 and 930 to around 3.8 each. This is to run a single 2560x1440 monitor on each system via a single GTX 970 G1 GPU.
So to start with I need to find out some settings for my 930 overclock. I've read loads of "how to" guides and quite honestly all I want is the figures to punch in and to be finished with it. Not opposed to testing and tweaking but I just want this done. My system is:
i7 930 DO
mobo: EX58A- UD3R
ram: 6GB Patriot (Enthusiast) 1600LL, DDR3, @ 533 MHz 7-7-7-20 (CL-RCD-RP-RAS) / 27-59-4-8-4-4 (RC-RFC-RRD-WR-WTR-RTP) at 1.65 volts

Now this is all aimed at not upgrading anything else for another year and then build from scratch. Has anybody got the bios settings for me to achieve this please. Then I shall do the same for my 920
 
Before you do anything do some benches at stock speeds. Then you can apply the overclock and compare. You might find the difference is tiny.

Hopefully others can advise on the OC settings, or you could ask to move the thread to the overclocking subforum which is more appropriate. (Click the Report Post button on your post to contact a mod.)
 
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