AMD FX-8350 Black Bottlenecking

[blobdagr8]

So, I have an AMD FX-8350 Black edition @4.0GHz and an NVIDIA GTX 980sc. On just about every game I play, my system under-performs. I know it's not my GPU as it has the highest clock speeds out of any card available, that I can find. My friend keeps telling me that I get low FPS on all my games because my CPU is bottlenecking my GPU's potential. It seems like it could make sense, but I can't tell for sure. Is there a way I can for sure test this, before I drop hundreds of dollars on a new CPU?

 

[clutchc]

I have run my FX-8350 @ stock with my GTX 980 using the Firestrike benchmark (default settings). It gave a score of 8989. Run yours and see how it compares.
http://www.3dmark.com/fs/8567362

The CPU was below 90% usage and the GPU was able to attain 99.9% usage. But with Firestrike, that usage number isn't very helpful. The card and CPU are both stressed to their utmost.

 

[jtk2515]

The 8350 is around the same performance as the skylake i3's
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFRquZP7h_8

 

[ddog]

You can use MSI afterburner and compare the CPU load to the GPU load to confirm.

 

[Decends]

I have run my FX-8350 @ stock with my GTX 980 using the Firestrike benchmark (default settings). It gave a score of 8989. Run yours and see how it compares.
http://www.3dmark.com/fs/8567362

The CPU was below 90% usage and the GPU was able to attain 99.9% usage. But with Firestrike, that usage number isn't very helpful. The card and CPU are both stressed to their utmost.

Synthetic benchmarks like Firestrike are not accurate for determining CPU bottlenecks. To determine if a CPU is bottlenecking a Video card, actual benchmarks of games are required.

As JTK said, the FX 8350 performs onpar with Skylake I3's for a idea of how sluggish the FX 8350. To answer the question, yes your FX 8350 is bottlenecking the GTX 980. You require atleast a I5 to squeeze most if not all performance out of your GTX 980.

 

[blobdagr8]

I have run my FX-8350 @ stock with my GTX 980 using the Firestrike benchmark (default settings). It gave a score of 8989. Run yours and see how it compares.
http://www.3dmark.com/fs/8567362

The CPU was below 90% usage and the GPU was able to attain 99.9% usage. But with Firestrike, that usage number isn't very helpful. The card and CPU are both stressed to their utmost.

Synthetic benchmarks like Firestrike are not accurate for determining CPU bottlenecks. To determine if a CPU is bottlenecking a Video card, actual benchmarks of games are required.

As JTK said, the FX 8350 performs onpar with Skylake I3's for a idea of how sluggish the FX 8350. To answer the question, yes your FX 8350 is bottlenecking the GTX 980. You require atleast a I5 to squeeze most if not all performance out of your GTX 980.

Perhaps i'll just switch to an i5... idk. Would it perhaps be an equally decent idea to swap GPU to an AMD card? Say a 390x?

 

[Decends]

I have run my FX-8350 @ stock with my GTX 980 using the Firestrike benchmark (default settings). It gave a score of 8989. Run yours and see how it compares.
http://www.3dmark.com/fs/8567362

The CPU was below 90% usage and the GPU was able to attain 99.9% usage. But with Firestrike, that usage number isn't very helpful. The card and CPU are both stressed to their utmost.

Synthetic benchmarks like Firestrike are not accurate for determining CPU bottlenecks. To determine if a CPU is bottlenecking a Video card, actual benchmarks of games are required.

As JTK said, the FX 8350 performs onpar with Skylake I3's for a idea of how sluggish the FX 8350. To answer the question, yes your FX 8350 is bottlenecking the GTX 980. You require atleast a I5 to squeeze most if not all performance out of your GTX 980.

Perhaps i'll just switch to an i5... idk. Would it perhaps be an equally decent idea to swap GPU to an AMD card? Say a 390x?

You would still bottleneck the video card. Upgrading to a I5 would be a wise move. Especially since the AM3+ socket is a dead socket. How much of a budget would you have for upgrading?

 

[jtk2515]

The 980 is better then the 390x in most games. that would be a sidegrade

 

[blobdagr8]

I have run my FX-8350 @ stock with my GTX 980 using the Firestrike benchmark (default settings). It gave a score of 8989. Run yours and see how it compares.
http://www.3dmark.com/fs/8567362

The CPU was below 90% usage and the GPU was able to attain 99.9% usage. But with Firestrike, that usage number isn't very helpful. The card and CPU are both stressed to their utmost.

Synthetic benchmarks like Firestrike are not accurate for determining CPU bottlenecks. To determine if a CPU is bottlenecking a Video card, actual benchmarks of games are required.

As JTK said, the FX 8350 performs onpar with Skylake I3's for a idea of how sluggish the FX 8350. To answer the question, yes your FX 8350 is bottlenecking the GTX 980. You require atleast a I5 to squeeze most if not all performance out of your GTX 980.

Perhaps i'll just switch to an i5... idk. Would it perhaps be an equally decent idea to swap GPU to an AMD card? Say a 390x?

You would still bottleneck the video card. Upgrading to a I5 would be a wise move. Especially since the AM3+ socket is a dead socket. How much of a budget would you have for upgrading?

Right now i'm looking at getting the i7 6700k quad-core 4.0GHz. It's 340$ and the reviews are all positive. It blows my cpu away in benchmarking. So, I guess that'll be my best bet.

 

[jtk2515]

6700k was 300$ over the 4th of July on ebay. So you missed it by about 5 days. ;-(

 

[Karadjgne]

I hate that saying "it's a dead socket" or "it's a dead end". Just about every single socket out there is a dead end. Haswells, dead, Broadwell, dead, Ivy Bridge, dead. Doesn't mean a damned thing. My 3770k will blow the doors off any skylake non oc'd cpu. Any. Bah!

AMD and Intel are seriously different architecture, they go about showing a picture in totally different ways. As such, coding in games can favor Intel or AMD depending entirely on the game. In BF4, the 8350 was second only in fps behind the i7 4790k, and not by much. Better than the i5 4690k by a good margin. That game is optimized for multiple core usage and suits amd quite well. Skyrim, on the other hand, is very heavy on single thread usage so amd cpus tend to bomb, badly, there with an i3 easily beating the 8350 in performance.

With the low TDP of FX Cpus, thermal throttling isn't hard to achieve, drivers can have issues, game not optimized for amd or multiple cores, power settings a little funky, bios settings disabled for some reason, there's any number of things that can cause crappy results. My GTX970 could barely push minecraft after swapping from i5-3570K to a i7-3770k, simply because I didn't update that stupid windows experience, was at unknown instead of 7.7 (tells me the i7 is very slow on processing ability). Fixed that and all good.

Nothing wrong with an 8350. 4.0 is a little low for what those cpus can usually do, but it's quite strong enough to handle a rx 480 at 1080p for most games, only the heavily single thread games like Skyrim are gonna make it suffer. Would a skylake cpu be better? Of course, single thread performance is about double the FX, so no brainer there. Bump the OC to @4.5GHz or better and you should see a difference.

 

[Decends]

I hate that saying "it's a dead socket" or "it's a dead end". Just about every single socket out there is a dead end. Haswells, dead, Broadwell, dead, Ivy Bridge, dead. Doesn't mean a damned thing. My 3770k will blow the doors off any skylake non oc'd cpu. Any. Bah!

AMD and Intel are seriously different architecture, they go about showing a picture in totally different ways. As such, coding in games can favor Intel or AMD depending entirely on the game. In BF4, the 8350 was second only in fps behind the i7 4790k, and not by much. Better than the i5 4690k by a good margin. That game is optimized for multiple core usage and suits amd quite well. Skyrim, on the other hand, is very heavy on single thread usage so amd cpus tend to bomb, badly, there with an i3 easily beating the 8350 in performance.

With the low TDP of FX Cpus, thermal throttling isn't hard to achieve, drivers can have issues, game not optimized for amd or multiple cores, power settings a little funky, bios settings disabled for some reason, there's any number of things that can cause crappy results. My GTX970 could barely push minecraft after swapping from i5-3570K to a i7-3770k, simply because I didn't update that stupid windows experience, was at unknown instead of 7.7 (tells me the i7 is very slow on processing ability). Fixed that and all good.

Nothing wrong with an 8350. 4.0 is a little low for what those cpus can usually do, but it's quite strong enough to handle a rx 480 at 1080p for most games, only the heavily single thread games like Skyrim are gonna make it suffer. Would a skylake cpu be better? Of course, single thread performance is about double the FX, so no brainer there. Bump the OC to @4.5GHz or better and you should see a difference.

If you want to be technical, Haswell isn't a dead end, Broadwell would be the dead end for the 1150 socket. Also, encoding Multi-core usage in a game is alot more challenging Vs Single core. which is why alot of games the FX line struggles. Just how far behind the FX 8350 is the I5 4690k? If you OC'd both those to limits, i would be willing to bet the I5 would lead the FX 8350. Also, Low TDP and FX processors in same sentence? Im assuming that was a typo. Also, you can only overclock a FX 8350 so far before you either hit the limit of the CPU or the limit of the motherboard.

 

[Karadjgne]

I've seen 8350's at 5.1GHz on nothing more than a H110 cooler, not seen a 4690k get that high. There's no planned releases of any LGA1150 cpu that I've heard of, its been superceded by lga1151, so it's a 'dead end' just like Lga1155. Just because the FX line isn't as strong as 1155 or newer, doesn't mean it's not a viable option, its just not the 'best' choice for a gaming platform. The 8350 tops out at @62°C, so yes, that's kinda low compared to Intel which generally hits @100°C. Because amd doesn't use on-core temp sensors like Intel does, temps get much harder to accurately assess and you end up with package temps and all kinds of wierd results.
Nobody codes games for single core usage anymore, even as heavily single threaded as skyrim is, stock it uses at least 2 cores. Generally, most common games are written to use upto 4 threads, there's only a few games such as bf4, watchdogs, WoW, Starwars battlefront etc, that are written and optimized for upto 8 threads, of which even an i7, either 1150 or 2011 only use 7 threads and the FX using the full 8. This is where the FX has the advantage over the i5, 8 slower threads simply do more work than 4 faster ones. With single thread performance at @ 2/3 an intel, assume Intel a value of 10 and fx a value of 6. 4x10 =40, 8x6=48. It's not a very large margin, but overall, clock for clock, the 8350 beats a 4690k in bf4. It's just a very well optimized game that favors higher thread counts. That's not to say that's the case in every game, but at least it's possible. I expect bf5 will be similar, and I'd like to think others will copy bf4's direction and success. Games coded like skyrim will die out soon enough, following the footsteps of replacing dual core cpus with quad cores

 

[CTurbo]

I don't see where the OP mentions which motherboard he is using. There is like a 75% chance that his mobo is throttling his FX8350.

 

[jtk2515]

I don't see where the OP mentions which motherboard he is using. There is like a 75% chance that his mobo is throttling his FX8350.

Asrock FTW!!!

 

[Karadjgne]

ASRock what? Anything less than a decent board like the 990FX Extreme6 or Extreme9 isn't worth much. Even the 990FX Killer isn't that great a board. And if it's not the MSI 970 Gaming, any of the other 970's doesn't have the power phases to handle high OC stability. Asrock is decent, but in a middling sort of way, sorry.

 

[Carbongrip]

FYI, all of intel's sockets get at minimum of 2 generations of chips. So the lga 1151 socket is not a dead end.

LGA1155 = 2nd Gen Sandy Bridge to 3rd Gen Ive Bridge
LGA1150 = 4th Gen Haswell to 5th Gen Broadwell
LGA1151 = 6th Gen Skylake to Future 7th Gen Kaby Lake

 

[wildnaughtygamerboy007]

I don't see where the OP mentions which motherboard he is using. There is like a 75% chance that his mobo is throttling his FX8350.

^^ This. You should supply system specs.

 

[Karadjgne]

Umm, yeah, that was stated. Earlier. My response was to the asinine comment about the FX sucks cuz it's a dead end. Well so is Ivy, Haswell, Broadwell etc. And yet you'll never see anyone actually bother to respond that Haswells suck cuz they are dead ends. And Broadwell doesn't really count, its more than an assumption that Broadwell was just a bone thrown out there, pretty much all of Intel's resources were devoted to Skylake.

 

[jtk2515]

ASRock what? Anything less than a decent board like the 990FX Extreme6 or Extreme9 isn't worth much. Even the 990FX Killer isn't that great a board. And if it's not the MSI 970 Gaming, any of the other 970's doesn't have the power phases to handle high OC stability. Asrock is decent, but in a middling sort of way, sorry.

I was Joking as most of the Asrock boards with 970 and 990 throttle pretty bad.

 

[madmatt30]

ASRock what? Anything less than a decent board like the 990FX Extreme6 or Extreme9 isn't worth much. Even the 990FX Killer isn't that great a board. And if it's not the MSI 970 Gaming, any of the other 970's doesn't have the power phases to handle high OC stability. Asrock is decent, but in a middling sort of way, sorry.

I was Joking as most of the Asrock boards with 970 and 990 throttle pretty bad.

^ I guessed that because Im a sarcastic **** too ;-) lol
sarcasm doesnt translate too well on the old interweb though,yep a low end msi or asrock will throttle the hell out of an 8350.
the op hasnt been back though & to be fair he never really expanded on what his performance problems actually were.