G4400 Bottleneck a 750Ti

[RTW970]

Ok, I know this sounds weird because I've heard in loads of places that a GTX 750Ti should not be bottlenecked by a Pentium G4400. But, when I play the Witcher 3, at random times the game just stutters to a complete stop for a few seconds at about 1FPS and then plays again. When this "stopping and starting" doesn't happen I can run the game at high settings with Hairworks turned off at 1080p at anywhere between 35-55 FPS.

I got MSI Afterburner and when I alt tabbed out of the game when it lagged again, I noticed that the GPU Power Usage was dropping to as low as 3% and the CPU usage was at 100%. I'm wondering if this is a bottleneck or something else and if there's a way to fix it.

My Rig:
Intel Dual-Core G4400 @3.3GHz
PSU: Corsair CX450M 80 Plus
GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 750Ti FTW
Motherboard ASUS H110 ATX LGA1151
RAM: 8GB DDR4 2400MHz

 

[Sm0k]

Well that Pentium G4400 is a weak CPU and with newer titles you going to have some problems and isn’t just the low clock speed but the lack of threads on those CPU.

 

[herrwizo]

There is one thing you can check - your max CPU temperatures while gaming. Post them here.

 

[RTW970]

There is one thing you can check - your max CPU temperatures while gaming. Post them here.

The CPU had a consistent 40 Degrees Celcius through gaming.

 

[herrwizo]

Sounds like invalid reading. Unless you are using some crazy high end water cooling, and even then it is doubtful. Try using some other software to monitor.

And clean heatsink and reapply thermal paste regardless.

 

[dontlistentome]

Try another game. The reason I suggest that is because for we know right now, this is a game issue not a hardware issue. If you get pauses like this in all demanding games, then it's a hardware issue.

From what I've seen, Witcher 3 is more about the GPU. On high settings at 1080p I'd expect the 750 Ti to be somewhere in the 30-35fps range.

 

[rcald2000]

+RTW970 Your issue does not stem from the G4400 bottlenecking the GTX 750 Ti. Your issue is caused by your CPU only being dual core without hyper-threading. It's very well known that many triple A titles will stutter with anything less than dual core *with* hyper-threading.

My advice: Upgrade your CPU on your existing skylake platform (Pentium G4400 to an Core i3-6100) or upgrade entire platform to kabylake (Pentium G4560). I personally own both of these CPUs and either will solve your stuttering issue. This is because they are dual core *with* hyper-threading. If you went with the simpler upgrade option of the i3-6100, you could sell your used G4400 on Ebay for ~$45 USD and buy a new i3-6100 on NewEgg for $119.99; $75 difference. The other choice is to sell your Asus 110 chipset motherboard and G4400 and use that money to purchase an equivalent motherboard and the Pentium G4560. I hope this helps.