Am I CPU Bottlenecking?

[Shazamy]

I'm running an i7 970 on an X58 Asus P6T Deluxe, overclocked to 3.8Ghz and memory is at 1600Mhz. I have a GTX 980 and even though I feel like I shouldn't be bottlenecking I've noticed that in games like Diablo 3, Grim Dawn and similar games, whenever there are lots of characters on-screen the frame-rates drop drastically.
The Reason I'm pretty sure there's some sort of problem is because I have seen my friends system which runs an i3 4170, 1600Mhz RAM and a GTX 960 but they're getting no drastic drops in frame rates in the exact same areas/situation in games where I am.

Other than my CPU and Mobo everything has been upgraded but I've had those for the last 7 years. Is an i3 from a couple years ago really faster for gaming than my i7? Should I upgrade?

Any information would be appreciated in advance, thank you

 

[dklims]

My guess is no but the only way to know for sure is too monitor you CPU usage and see if any cores or threads are at or near 100% during gameplay. If you dont know how to do this you can use the windows tool CONTROL + SHIFT+ ESCAPE then the performance tab then hitting open resource monitor. Or you can use something like msi afterburner to monitor it.

Let me know if this made sense

 

[utroz]

It could be that the single thread performance of your cpu is what the bottleneck is. Do as the post above mine says and go to the Task Manager but make sure you change the view to per cpu load to be able to see what each cpu core is doing. One or two cores could be running at 100% load causing the poor game performance in certain games. A new i3 would have more single thread performance but lower multi thread performance. If you were to upgrade get at least a i5 or you will loose multi thread performance.

 

[dklims]

It could be that the single thread performance of your cpu is what the bottleneck is. Do as the post above mine says and go to the Task Manager but make sure you change the view to per cpu load to be able to see what each cpu core is doing. One or two cores could be running at 100% load causing the poor game performance in certain games. A new i3 would have more single thread performance but lower multi thread performance. If you were to upgrade get at least a i5 or you will loose multi thread performance.

Yes I agree with Utroz if you do come to find it is the bottleneck a current gen I5 would be the best option in terms of price/performance

 

[Shazamy]

I'll do the test a little later when I have time, but if I do end up needing to upgrade, considering all I do on this pc is game, what would be my best price/performance CPU? Also if I can keep my DDR3 that would save money and be nice

 

[dklims]

Well, If you are really want to keep your ddr3 ram, I would say get variation of the haswell i5. (4th gen). I can personally say I have a ivy bridge i7 (3rd gen) and 2 980ti's and am not bottlenecked at stock speeds by my CPU, so you would have NO ISSUES with a i5 4th gen.

However, I would recommend getting the most recent gen processor, Skylake.(6th gen). Because The price is the same basically as the 4th gen. It also seems kind silly to upgrade to already aged tech. Skylake isn't crazy better but for the same price any performance increase is extra.

SO... if you can afford it go for the newest i5 (get the "k" version if you want to overclock) and get the ddr4 memory.

but if you really can't afford that the haswell i5 will suit your needs just fine for now.