[SOLVED] Overclocking and explanation of cpu and gpu usage

SkyRock1986

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Feb 28, 2019
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So I currently have my DDR4 16GB of ram at a stable overclock and paired with my Ryzen 5 2600x set to automatic which I have been noticing in Shadow of the Tomb Raider has been allowing my CPU to reach 4250Mhz sometimes. Temps are all good and stable. I noticed that when I told my bios to set my cpu to Auto rather than its default 3.6 or 3600Mhz, that my CPU percentage usage went way down. I mean way down. I have been playing ULTRA everything on Shadow of the Tomb Raider with ULTRA on ray tracing as well and my CPU hits like 33% MAX sometimes as low as only utilizing 13% to 18% However my RTX 2070 GPU stays steady at 98%. This is healthy or no? Everything is buttery smooth, but isnt this technically a bottleneck? or is this good?
 
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So I currently have my DDR4 16GB of ram at a stable overclock and paired with my Ryzen 5 2600x set to automatic which I have been noticing in Shadow of the Tomb Raider has been allowing my CPU to reach 4250Mhz sometimes. Temps are all good and stable. I noticed that when I told my bios to set my cpu to Auto rather than its default 3.6 or 3600Mhz, that my CPU percentage usage went way down. I mean way down. I have been playing ULTRA everything on Shadow of the Tomb Raider with ULTRA on ray tracing as well and my CPU hits like 33% MAX sometimes as low as only utilizing 13% to 18% However my RTX 2070 GPU stays steady at 98%. This is healthy or no? Everything is buttery smooth, but isnt this technically a bottleneck? or is this good...
So I currently have my DDR4 16GB of ram at a stable overclock and paired with my Ryzen 5 2600x set to automatic which I have been noticing in Shadow of the Tomb Raider has been allowing my CPU to reach 4250Mhz sometimes. Temps are all good and stable. I noticed that when I told my bios to set my cpu to Auto rather than its default 3.6 or 3600Mhz, that my CPU percentage usage went way down. I mean way down. I have been playing ULTRA everything on Shadow of the Tomb Raider with ULTRA on ray tracing as well and my CPU hits like 33% MAX sometimes as low as only utilizing 13% to 18% However my RTX 2070 GPU stays steady at 98%. This is healthy or no? Everything is buttery smooth, but isnt this technically a bottleneck? or is this good?

So the term 'bottleneck' gets thrown around allot and tends to get people worried, lots of threads on here "will X bottleneck Y" and so on.

The fact is in any build, there is always a bottleneck somewhere- as in you are never going to have limitless performance so therefore something must be the limit. The general idea on a gaming build is your graphics card should be the bottleneck, which is exactly what you are seeing- your graphics card is running as fast as it can, so the Ryzen 5 is sitting there with low utilisation. That means that if say in a couple of years time you decided to upgrade to the a new 'RTX 4070' your cpu should have enough headroom to keep up with the newer card (as currently the cpu is under 20% utilisation).

What can be a little confusing though is what those utilisation % figures mean, especially with the cpu. That figure is the amount of the total cpu that is being used (which in the case of the 2600X is 12 threads, each of which can be used from 0 - 100%, so 18% utilisation could mean all 12 threads used at 18% or 1 thread used at 100% and the rest used at 5%). Where game performance can be held back (especially with older games) is the performance of 1 thread being maxed out, many older games could only use a single core to send data to the graphics card. In those situations you can wind up with the cpu looking like it's got lots of headroom (say only 30% usage), but the gpu being bogged down at sat 50% usage. That is what happened with the old 'FX' processors which had lots of cores but very poor per core performance, which made them pretty bad in games. Luckily Ryzen doesn't have this issue and as you can see your 2070 is pretty much maxed out so you aren't leaving any performance on the table.

TL, DR: This is good and what people usually look for out of a gaming build- the graphics card being fully used to get the most frames possible. When people talk about a bottleneck they are referring to the cpu hitting a limit (either in total or on one core) meaning the graphics card usage is low.
 
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