CPU bottlenecking?

Stratohero · Post by **Stratohero** » Wed Dec 02, 2015 4:48 am

I have an old PC as a secondary, but with a lot of newer parts.

However, the CPU/MBO are pretty old: AMD Phenom II X2 550 and Asrock M3N78D.

I was thinking of upgrading it with a new GPU, the potential candidates are Nvidia 750ti, GTX950 and GTX960, in the order of increased performance and price.

Would it make sense to go beyond the 750ti, how would I know that the CPU would bottleneck?

Post by **NeilBlanchard** » Wed Dec 02, 2015 5:51 am

It depends on what you will use it for. A few games are CPU limited, but many are GPU limited.

edh · Post by **edh** » Wed Dec 02, 2015 5:54 am

I thought you said you were very disappointed in this forum?

Bottlenecking is dependant upon the specific game and workload. Some games would be CPU bottlenecked on such a system with even onboard graphics, others wouldn't be bottlenecked with a GTX 980Ti. So what will you be using the system for? If it is only a 'spare' computer then I wouldn't spend the money at all.

Also, if it is a secondary system then what do you have in your main system? A cascade upgrade may make more financial sense.

quest_for_silence · Post by **quest_for_silence** » Wed Dec 02, 2015 6:09 am

edh wrote:I thought you said you were very disappointed in this forum?

That guy has already been moderated a while ago, then that guy pissed off the community: please, leave that guy alone, that makes much more sense.

Stratohero · Post by **Stratohero** » Wed Dec 02, 2015 6:28 am

Are you stalking me??

quest_for_silence · Post by **quest_for_silence** » Wed Dec 02, 2015 6:59 am

Stratohero wrote:Are you stalking me??

Quite the opposite, you are stalking us: please, go home.

Post by **CA_Steve** » Wed Dec 02, 2015 7:14 am

Stratohero wrote:how would I know that the CPU would bottleneck?

Easy test: plug your primary PC's gfx card into this setup, run your apps and look at task manager to see if the CPU is pegged. That'll be one data point.

xen · Post by **xen** » Fri Dec 11, 2015 9:04 am

There is a guy who has done a "debunking bottlenecking" video that kinda blew up on him as his i7-now-i3 did really start "bottlenecking" his whatever high end card he was using.

So a reasonable i3 really started bottlenecking his GTX 980 or whatever he used.

But with an i5, nothing really changed.

In the comments to that video people asked lots of questions about combinations.

Personally, I just played WoW at ultra settings 1080p with 100% GTX 950 load. This was on a FX 6300 with 6 cores. The game uses 4 cores. But I believe it used 4 cores at perhaps 30% load on average. Reduce that to two cores and it still wouldn't have trumped my CPU.

That is 2x 3.5 GHz would have been enough for this card I'm sure.

So one thing to know is that the CPU will never bottleneck the 750ti. 950 might get close. 960 it probably will start happening. That's what I believe based on a little bit of data. Your CPU is 2x 3.1 GHz and probably it would be enough for my 950 in WoW ultra at 1080p.

Heck, I would probably put a 960 inside my 2x 2.6 GHz Athlon X2 5050e. Not everything is very CPU dependent. Maybe your framerate will get locked (maxed) but you would still be able to increase detail at a certain framerate. For instance, WoW "view distance" requires only CPU and memory, not GPU. On my "lower end systems" I always had detail, shadows etc at minimum and view distance at ultra. You can always play around with this in your game to find a setting where you can utilize your GPU to the max, probably.

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