Question Bottleneck or cpu overheating?

tomas.sherrington

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Dec 18, 2018
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When I play games both gpu and CPU usage is fluctuates, gpu between 20-99% and cpu between 60-95%, my fps seems to drop by about 50% when the gpu usage drops

My temps are gpu 74c (r9 290 is a hot card so this is normal)

CPU is running at 78c on full load and about 48 idle, my CPU is quite hot it used to be around 84c but i replaced thermal paste like 5 months ago. I have stock cooler, think i should change that?



Bottleneck or just cpu to hot?



I have I5 3470 @ 3.2ghz

R9 290 gigabyte oc edition

8gb ddr3 ram @1333mhz

650w psu
 

boju

Titan
Ambassador
What game's are you playing?

Your cpu's temp isn't too bad, it can be improved but shouldn't be causing fps drops unless cpu is throttling speed if it got to 90c+. What's causing fps drops in your case is most likely high cpu usage.

The cpu pre-renders frames for the gpu so depending on types of games you play, high cpu usage can hinder performance of it's self and gpu. Common solutions is increase resolution or details so fps demanded by the gpu isn't as high. Also minimising background processes can benefit the cpu allowing it to focus more resources towards your games.

Depending on the games you're playing it's possible 4cores isn't enough. If you could manage to find an i7 3770/3770k + Hyper 212 Evo cooler for a reasonable price, it would improve things quite a bit.

Ram can be improved too. 16GB is recommended nowadays to avoid too much pagefile (HDD) activity in modern games.
 

Phazoner

Distinguished
The i5 3570 should be able to handle the 290 in almost any scenario, maybe with a little bottleneck in very CPU demanding games, but not so bad to cut the FPS in half. The CPU temps are reasonable while they are under 80ºC.

Reinstall the drivers just in case. Uninstall them with DDU and reinstall them. I wouls also check for MoBo BIOS updates or even possible common problems with the 290 BIOS which could be solved also by updating it.