i7 5960x bottleneck and slow performance

[ngonidzashe]

hello guys.. desperation has led me to surf the internet in search of a possible solution. my i7 5960x seems to be bottlenecking my gtx 980ti. somehow when I first had this build everything and games ran as smooth as butter. the i7 5960x was a gift even the motherboard was a gift by a friend for my birthday otherwise I wanted the i7 4790k. anyway the first two weeks of using this build was amazing but now this processor seems to be maxing out on only 2cores instead of 8.

my build

intel core i7 5960x 3.ghz 8cores overclocked by a friend to 3.5ghz
NVidia gforce gtx 980ti 6gb gddr5 no overclock (wanted to try but don't know much about overclocking)
gskills ripjaws ddr4 16gb @ 2400mhz
motherboard will check the name

my temperatures never goes above 85degrees under full load for the gpu and the cpu only reaches 77degrees whilst gaming and at one time it reached 80 surely the temperatures are good right?

I used to max out games like assasins creed at 2560x1440 resolution and getting mostly 60+ frames with moderate antialising but now my gpu is showing around 45 percent usage whilst two of my cores core 1 and core 3 max out at 100percent usage whilst the rest will be around 40percent usage.

my friend has almost the exact same setup as mine except he has an amd gpu radeon r9 295x and i7 4770k.
if I am to get this straight the gtx 980ti should be way powerful than that radeon and the 5960x should also be faster than the 4770k so how is it possible that im now getting lower frame rates than my friend. and why is it that the 5960x which is supposed to handle any gpu seem to be bottlenecking.

 

[DarkTerbear]

The 5960X is NOT faster than the 4770K in games. Games are not heavily multithreaded, so the faster single cores of the 4770K will fare better. Check your CPU usage, and see how many cores are used.

 

[ngonidzashe]

what I don't gather is games are not mostly cpu bound and the 5960x is supposed to drive the gtx 980ti no bottleneck but now I see that only two cores on the 8core 5960x are maxed out whilst the others are around 30 to 45 percent usage. the low clock speeds of the 5960x cores doesn't also explain why my gpu is not reaching 90 to 100 percent usage even when I increase anti aliasing and fxaa and other gpu hungry settings. besides isn't the 980ti better than the radeon r9 295x2.. I should be getting better frame rates

 

[DarkTerbear]

The CPU is the bottleneck, so your 980ti does not need to reach full usage to max out your 5960X.

 

[ngonidzashe]

how is it possible that the 5960x 8 core overclocked to 3.5ghz bottlenecks the 980ti....so im better off with the 4770k or 4790k than the 5960x?

 

[DarkTerbear]

how is it possible that the 5960x 8 core overclocked to 3.5ghz bottlenecks the 980ti....so im better off with the 4770k or 4790k than the 5960x?

Your results confirm that. Games like you said use 2 cores, so what will do better, 2 4ghz cores or 2 3.5ghz cores?. The 5960x if a professional grade CPU for rendering and number crunching, not gaming.

 

[oinkypig]

 

[DarkTerbear]

The only way to make up for the lack of a respective multi core processor handling video games as well as a quad core 6700k is to go for maximum overclock of 4.7ghz for a literal 3/10% increase in performance just from a bit more megahertz

U will kill your CPU with 4.7ghz on a 5960x

 

[oinkypig]

The only way to make up for the lack of a respective multi core processor handling video games as well as a quad core 6700k is to go for maximum overclock of 4.7ghz for a literal 3/10% increase in performance just from a bit more megahertz

U will kill your CPU with 4.7ghz on a 5960x

 

[ngonidzashe]

alright thank you. let me borrow and swop out with a friend's 5820k and check if anything changes. thank you