Is my FX6300 cpu bottlenecking my GTX 1050 2GB graphics card?

[Rafael Mestdag]

Is my good old FX6300 already bottlenecking my new GTX 1050 2GB? Maybe one proof of this is the little amount of fps gain in most games in comparison to my previous card, a GTX 750 1GB. Mostly I've gained about 20-28 fps only in most games, in some cases less.
Also, in some cases, the video card will not achieve its full potential, using only about 40-50% of its power.

Is it possible that my FX6300 is the bottleneck here?

 

[dudeman509]

GPU at 40-50% of its power kinda says it all.

If you have a board that will overclock decently, do it (running a FX at 4.2-4.5 GHz makes a big improvement). You'll get some return out of that. Beyond that, it's time for a CPU/MB upgrade.

 

[gavi7566]

lookout for the cpu usage. if it is at 90-100% or even 80%, the answer is
A 'YES'. Overclocking the cpu with decent cooling solution should solve the problem. you dont wanna overclock on a stock cooler unless you want to fry things up.

 

[Rafael Mestdag]

lookout for the cpu usage. if it is at 90-100% or even 80%, the answer is
A 'YES'. Overclocking the cpu with decent cooling solution should solve the problem. you dont wanna overclock on a stock cooler unless you want to fry things up.

That's the strange thing about it, the cpu usage is about 40% as well, sometimes 30%. It's like the cpu isn't even breaking a sweat in most games.
Another curiosity comes from the fact that Crysis 3 for example has an average 60-75 fps (on high settings, 1600x900) whereas an aging DX9 truck simulator sometimes gets down to 20 fps in parts, and both the cpu and the gpu usage in this case don't go past 50%.

It seems like DX11 games push the video card a lot more than dx9 ones.

 

[dudeman509]

lookout for the cpu usage. if it is at 90-100% or even 80%, the answer is
A 'YES'. Overclocking the cpu with decent cooling solution should solve the problem. you dont wanna overclock on a stock cooler unless you want to fry things up.

That's the strange thing about it, the cpu usage is about 40% as well, sometimes 30%. It's like the cpu isn't even breaking a sweat in most games.
Another curiosity comes from the fact that Crysis 3 for example has an average 60-75 fps (on high settings, 1600x900) whereas an aging DX9 truck simulator sometimes gets down to 20 fps in parts, and both the cpu and the gpu usage in this case don't go past 50%.

It seems like DX11 games push the video card a lot more than dx9 ones.

Depends on how the game is threaded. Look at individual core usage. In those that hammer a single thread or two (many older games), the FX really falls behind due to its low IPC compared to Intel.

 

[sizzling]

Overall CPU usage is meaningless, need to look at each core as dudeman says. There are games that a FX6xxx cpu cannot hold 60fps with any gpu or setting

 

[kgt1182]

I have faced the same problem as you. I have a FX 4350 build which had its GPU upgraded to an RX 480. The framerate gain from R7 370 was minimal as the GPU is being limited by the CPU.

At that time I did no want to upgrade as I was waiting for Ryzen. I therefore bought myself a water cooler (which i reused in my Ryzen build) and overclocked my FX 4350 to 5.0 GHz. That took me 1.632V which degraded my chip. Yet even at 5.0 GHz there are still some frame drops below 60 FPS. A temporary solution is to get a water cooler and overclock to 4.8 GHz @1.50-1.55V,

At CPU bound scenarios you want your RAM to be clocked higher with tighter latencies. Also, you should disable C States, APM, HPC and turbo for a constant stable clock for maximum performance.

Hope this helps.

 

[sizzling]

Any overclock potential will be dictated by other factors such as motherboard and PSU as well as cooling. We need to know make and model of these before considering overclocking.