[SOLVED] Intel I9-9900KS & Nvidia RTX 3080 - any bottlenecking issues?

jabbadahut

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I got a nice monetary gift from somone important to me and it's time for me to replace my ancient FX-8320 & GTX 1050Ti with a more powerful CPU & GPU. Just like the title of this thread states, if I get an I9-9900KS and an Nvdia RTX 3080, would there be any bottlenecking either at the CPU or GPU when gaming? Thanks in advance.
 
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You'd be better off with a 12600k/3080 than the power hungry and excessively overheating 9900KS. Or even a 5900x.

You'll spend more money on cooling the case and gpu and cpu than the 9900KS is worth in performance.

Bottleneck is all about balance, not performance. As resolution goes up, fps goes down, limited by the gpu. As resolution goes down, fps goes up, limited by the cpu. Doesn't matter which game, even a gpu heavy game is affected that way, or a cpu heavy game. How much fps is gained or lost is very dependent on the game.

If playing Cyberpunk 2077 and max uber ultimate settings gets you 100fps at 1080p and 40fps at 4k, you are gpu bound in both cases. Play CSGO and get 400fps/1080p and 400fps/4k, you are cpu bound in both...
I got a nice monetary gift from somone important to me and it's time for me to replace my ancient FX-8320 & GTX 1050Ti with a more powerful CPU & GPU. Just like the title of this thread states, if I get an I9-9900KS and an Nvdia RTX 3080, would there be any bottlenecking either at the CPU or GPU when gaming? Thanks in advance.
Depends. Bottlenecking will be on a per game, per settings basis. What resolution? All eye candy settings on?

At 1440p+ with all eye-candy settings maxxed you will most likely be GPU bound with the latest AAA games.
At 1080p and/or in older games you may be CPU bound.

What's the max refresh rate of your monitor? Any FPS over that is meaningless.
 

Karadjgne

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You'd be better off with a 12600k/3080 than the power hungry and excessively overheating 9900KS. Or even a 5900x.

You'll spend more money on cooling the case and gpu and cpu than the 9900KS is worth in performance.

Bottleneck is all about balance, not performance. As resolution goes up, fps goes down, limited by the gpu. As resolution goes down, fps goes up, limited by the cpu. Doesn't matter which game, even a gpu heavy game is affected that way, or a cpu heavy game. How much fps is gained or lost is very dependent on the game.

If playing Cyberpunk 2077 and max uber ultimate settings gets you 100fps at 1080p and 40fps at 4k, you are gpu bound in both cases. Play CSGO and get 400fps/1080p and 400fps/4k, you are cpu bound in both cases.

The game will decide what balance of cpu to gpu bound you are, resolution and detail settings just make that imbalance more or less obvious.
 
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jabbadahut

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Sep 5, 2015
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You'd be better off with a 12600k/3080 than the power hungry and excessively overheating 9900KS. Or even a 5900x.

You'll spend more money on cooling the case and gpu and cpu than the 9900KS is worth in performance.

Bottleneck is all about balance, not performance. As resolution goes up, fps goes down, limited by the gpu. As resolution goes down, fps goes up, limited by the cpu. Doesn't matter which game, even a gpu heavy game is affected that way, or a cpu heavy game. How much fps is gained or lost is very dependent on the game.

If playing Cyberpunk 2077 and max uber ultimate settings gets you 100fps at 1080p and 40fps at 4k, you are gpu bound in both cases. Play CSGO and get 400fps/1080p and 400fps/4k, you are cpu bound in both cases.

The game will decide what balance of cpu to gpu bound you are, resolution and detail settings just make that imbalance more or less obvious.

Yes, as I was designing my system I found out that the place I'm thinking of buying from pointed out they only carry the 9900K anyway. I fogot to mention the resolution, too so I apologize for that. but thanks for educating me on bottlenecking.
 

Karadjgne

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The KS is a better binned version of the K and has higher turbo clocks on multiple cores, as well as running at slightly lower voltages, out of the box. You can pretty much match the KS specs with a K, just takes some tweaking of the OC menus.

But being OC, there's no guarantee that that's possible, which is why the KS costs more, because that work is already done, and guaranteed, by Intel.

The only issues being that the 12600k basically dominates the 9900k in gaming, costs half as much, uses far less power and is far easier to cool, which is important when paired with another high heat output in the case, like a 3080
 

shady28

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There's a perfect chart to answer this question at TPU.

This is from their 12900K review, they use a 3080 on their gaming benchmarks and show CPUs down to 10400. The 9900K is roughly equivalent to a 10700K on this chart.

The 12600K that was recommended is easily the best performance/price product for gaming right now. You can see individual games at the link.

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-core-i9-12900k-alder-lake-12th-gen/16.html

relative-performance-games-1920-1080.png