I5 760 and GTX 970

[Xaikhem]

I have an I5 760 oc'd on water to 4ghz and just bought a gtx 970. I'm suffering from low GPU utilization and wondering if my system is just to dated to fully utilize it.

How much of a performance increase would I get going to a Z97 mobo and a i7-4790K?

 

[qubits]

maybe cpu.. is your cpu hitting 100 percent usage? what game?

 

[Xaikhem]

maybe cpu.. is your cpu hitting 100 percent usage? what game?

Final Fantasy XIV, World of Warcraft and Star wars The Old Republic are what I mostly play. I'm getting between 40/70 percent cpu utilization and the card isn't going above 38/42 percent. I play at 1920x1080.
Wow is dipping into the 60/50fps range and Final fantasy is getting as low as the 30's

 

[nucolos]

Well, not really sure, the performance of that cpu is bad for today standards, an i3-4150 has better performance per core, and in total, so thats a possibility, . If you can i would suggest you get a new cpu anyways because some games, specially online games, will suffer from that cpu, but go with an i5 if you are only going to be gaming, you will not benefit form an i7 in gaming.

 

[qubits]

if your seeing 1 or 2 cores hitting full load in game then it is holding your gpu back..

yeah you can get a i7 if you want and some games can use hyperthreading but even in the ones that can a i5 is really close in performance

 

[Xaikhem]

The thing is my cores never hit 90+ percent. I've been reading other threads about gtx 970's and people having problems with low utilization.

Maybe I'd be better off returning it and getting an ATI card? or upgrade the CPU first? I had a GTX 470 before and this 970 doesn't feel much faster.

 

[qubits]

yeah i have seen people talk about issues with the gtx 9xx seems to point at the driver being crap for some games

 

[Xaikhem]

Here's an image of wow running. I was getting 62 fps at the time so something is bottlenecking it.

http://i.imgur.com/De9ZOZq.png

 

[qubits]

the evidence does not seem to point to a cpu bottleneck but it is not always so strait forward since every game is different

i dont think it would be a waist of money to get a new cpu and motherboard but i cant say if it would completely solve it

 

[iam2thecrowe]

what resolution are you playing at and are you using AA? easiest way to determine a bottleneck, reduce the screen resolution by half, if there is no real improvement then you are cpu bottlenecked.

 

[con635]

Those games are just not going to push a high end gpu to its limits, the 970 simply doesnt have to work that hard to run them however you may see a framerate improvement with a haswell core.