I5 6600K Bottlenecking GTX 1070?

[pauldhiggins1]

I noticed when I'm playing some newer AAA titles (AC Odyssey, Battlefield 5, ect.), My CPU will be anywhere from 90% to 100% on all 4 cores and my GPU will be anywhere from 50% to 90% and I get around 60 or lower FPS at 1080p. Even in not-so-new games like GTA 5 I'll get 60-70 FPS at any given time but my CPU usage is high and my GPU usage is lower. Is this normal for this setup? No matter what graphics settings I use the FPS only changes slightly. What should I do? Overclocking is not an option because I have a non-z170 motherboard (the motherboard was donated to me when my friend upgraded his rig), but if it will help a lot then i will consider getting a Z170 motherboard and overclock.

My setup:
i5 6600k (stock speed)
Asus b150 Pro-D3 motherboard
EVGA GTX 1070 FTW
16GB RAM
Asus 1080p 144 Hz monitor

 

[Supernova1138]

Yeah, at 1080p you are going to hit a CPU bottleneck. The problem is that a lot of newer AAA titles, the latest Assassin's Creed games and Battlefield games in particular need more than 4 threads to run well. Getting a new motherboard just to overclock isn't really worthwhile as the lack of threads are what is causing those performance drops, overclocking would help a bit, but it won't completely fix the problem.

If you don't want to get a new motherboard, your only real upgrade options would be to grab a 6th or 7th gen i7, which would get you more threads, eg. i7 6700/6700k or 7700/7700k if you do a BIOS update. If you're going to get a new board anyway, you might as well get a newer CPU and either grab a Ryzen chip eg. an R5 2600 or get a 300 series Intel chipset motherboard and grab an 8th or 9th gen i5 or i7 which will have 6 or more cores.

 

[pauldhiggins1]

Thanks for the help. I think I will pick up an i7 7700 and try to sell my 6600K because I don't really feel the need to upgrade my motherboard if it won't help anything. The extra threads on the 7700 should improve my FPS.

 

[pauldhiggins1]

UPDATE: Just for anyone that's in the same boat I'm in, the i7 7700 gave me a pretty big improvement! I'm now seeing up to a 30 average FPS increase, and about 20 minimum FPS increase, in games like Battlefield 5 and other AAA games. It seems like a 4 core 4 thread i5 doesn't quite cut it for these new games coming out anymore