Just bought a second R9 290 for crossfire, will my fx-8150 be a problem?

[maxpare79]

Ok I just bought a second Sapphire 290 to crossfire for the first time in my life! I bought it without really thinking lol just was so in love with my first one, and got a little bit of money that came so I said what the heck! I wan't a Korean Monitor overclock to 120Hz at 1440p so

Anyway, what I didn't think about was that my cpu could bottleneck those 2 gpus...Will the 8150 do that (running at 4.2ghz)? If I replace it with a 8350 would that benefit a lot?

Switching to Intel with the cost involve (mobo + cpu) would really put me back (I know I know lol that guy buys 2x 290 but don't want to spend more on Ivy Bridge) And I always had AMD system so I am not really familiar with the intel architecture...

Should I get a 8350...9590 or wait for steamroller, or will the 8150 do just fine....or last resort switch to intel.

Please avoid fanboy response ;-)
Thx

 

[JOOK-D]

8120 is bulldozer architecture, so you'd see a performance boost from switching to 8320/8350(piledriver). I wouldn't go with the 9xxx FX series personally, not enough performance for the money.

I think you should wait and see whether your CPU bottlenecks it before buying anything.

 

[maxpare79]

Is there a way to find out for sure that my CPU is holding me back? I mean I will use it to play BF4....what should I do, just look at the FPS and compare it with benchmarks online?

 

[JOOK-D]

Is there a way to find out for sure that my CPU is holding me back? I mean I will use it to play BF4....what should I do, just look at the FPS and compare it with benchmarks online?

The way I usually determine a CPU bottleneck is this:
Get a resource monitoring program (e.g. GPU-Z) to measure your GPU usage and just use task manager to measure your CPU usage.
Slowly decrease your graphics settings. If your FPS does not increase by reducing graphics settings then your CPU could be bottlenecking. The CPU/GPU resource monitors come in handy at this point since you can see whether the CPU is maxed out - however, I doubt it will be since it's an 8 core and most games don't utilise that many. You could always check resource monitor within task manager and see how much work each individual core is doing.

Not the most scientific of methods, but it works for me.

Also have you applied the windows 7 hotfixes for bulldozer CPUs?

 

[maxpare79]

Well I was running on win7 up until like 2 weeks ago but decided to give 8.1 a try since BF4 is suppose to be optimize for it...

 

[JOOK-D]

Well I was running on win7 up until like 2 weeks ago but decided to give 8.1 a try since BF4 is suppose to be optimize for it...

Ok, win8 fixed the issue, no need for hotfixes.