Processor Bottleneck?

[Xiahoudun32]

I recently bought an Nvidia Geforce GTX 260 and it is not giving the performance I anticipated at my 1920x1080 resoltuion. I have an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ running at 2.6ghz, whereas most benchmarks I see have processors running above 3.0ghz, most of them even quad core. It's the only thing I can think of to be a bottleneck , as I have 4gb of ram and again the GTX 260 (properly powered). I just want to check any other possibilities before buying a new processor.

 

[daedalus685]

Most certainly. That is a far too weak cpu for that gpu.

 

[Xiahoudun32]

Thanks for the speedy reply, can't wait to get this baby going at what I was anticipating before. 😀

 

[Xiahoudun32]

Most certainly. That is a far too weak cpu for that gpu.

My next question would be, Should I go quad core, or go for a really good dual core?

 

[Twoboxer]

Ideally, a really good quad core lol. But if budget comes first, and gaming's the gig, then the fastest 2 or (since this is AMD) 3 core you can afford will serve you best.

 

[Xiahoudun32]

I was already leaning pretty heavily for an AMD Phenom II X4 940 Deneb 3.0GHz, all I need to do is check compatibility.

 

[megamanx00]

Even when I had my single 3850 it was slightly bottlenecked by the Athlon 5000 X2 at it's stock speed. You may want to overclock your Athlon 5000 to lessen that bottleneck. You should be able to hit at least 3.0GHz even with the stock cooler.

 

[hella-d]

Im Will Be Going With The Athlon II X2 250 With My Next Upgrade Since My Current Board Is AM2+ Capable Of 3.6GHz+ On Stock Cooling Its Even Enough That It Will Keep My Other Next Upgrade (A GTX285) Happy And At $87.00 On Newegg You Cant Beat It......

The Phenom X2 550 Is Also A Good Choice (It Has The Same Phenom Core As The Athlon II X2, But The X2 Lacks The 6MB Of L3 Allthough It Seems So Make Little Realworld Differance)

 

[Mousemonkey]

Im Will Be Going With The Athlon II X2 250 With My Next Upgrade Since My Current Board Is AM2+ Capable Of 3.6GHz+ On Stock Cooling Its Even Enough That It Will Keep My Other Next Upgrade (A GTX285) Happy And At $87.00 On Newegg You Cant Beat It......

The Phenom X2 550 Is Also A Good Choice (It Has The Same Phenom Core As The Athlon II X2, But The X2 Lacks The 6MB Of L3 Allthough It Seems So Make Little Realworld Differance)

That's nice, not sure what it's got in common with the OP though, and the use of a capitol letter on each word escapes me but so long as you're happy Hella-D, everything is OK.

 

[Mousemonkey]

Right up until you have to duck during a frenzied firefight and realise that you've worn out the shift key. :lol:

 

[invisik]

Its a light bottleneck at such a high resolution usually the card does much of the work. Of you have the money go for the upgrade but if not just overclock your cpu and you should be fine.

 

[trkorecky]

Right up until you have to duck during a frenzied firefight and realise that you've worn out the shift key. :lol:

But that's what the control button is for. Why crouch with shift when I can use that to sprint?

 

[photonboy]

Easily checked:
Run the Task Manager (CTRL-ALT-DEL) while a game is running. Close out the game and look at your CPU history.

Is one or more cores maxed out at 100%? You're CPU limited.

Considering my X2-4800+ S939 is running an average of 75% but up to 90% and occasionally 100% on one of the cores using a "lowly" HD3870 I'd say you are definitely bottlenecked. I figure the HD4770 would, on average be the best card for my X2-4800+. I'll probably get one to tide me over until I get a 6-core Intel and DX11, SATA600 etc.

You still have a pretty nice system for many games. This is what I'd do:

1) overclock the CPU by 10% or more (if needed, careful to drop RAM timings first etc)

2) replace the system in at least another year

At this point in the PC hardware world, if you have a half-decent PC I recommend waiting for SATA 600 motherboards and DX11 graphics.

Lots of games will run awesome on your system. Sure, it's no Crysis killer. I can say Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 as newer games will run really great.

So, yeah, your CPU-bottlnecked. I say pick games that run good on YOUR system and don't feel compelled to upgrade constantly.

 

[Xiahoudun32]

Even when I had my single 3850 it was slightly bottlenecked by the Athlon 5000 X2 at it's stock speed. You may want to overclock your Athlon 5000 to lessen that bottleneck. You should be able to hit at least 3.0GHz even with the stock cooler.

Whoa really? I've never been much to overclock, but that would be great to start with until I can save up enough to get that quad core.

Easily checked:
Run the Task Manager (CTRL-ALT-DEL) while a game is running. Close out the game and look at your CPU history.

Is one or more cores maxed out at 100%? You're CPU limited.

Considering my X2-4800+ S939 is running an average of 75% but up to 90% and occasionally 100% on one of the cores using a "lowly" HD3870 I'd say you are definitely bottlenecked. I figure the HD4770 would, on average be the best card for my X2-4800+. I'll probably get one to tide me over until I get a 6-core Intel and DX11, SATA600 etc.

You still have a pretty nice system for many games. This is what I'd do:

1) overclock the CPU by 10% or more (if needed, careful to drop RAM timings first etc)

2) replace the system in at least another year

At this point in the PC hardware world, if you have a half-decent PC I recommend waiting for SATA 600 motherboards and DX11 graphics.

Lots of games will run awesome on your system. Sure, it's no Crysis killer. I can say Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 as newer games will run really great.

So, yeah, your CPU-bottlnecked. I say pick games that run good on YOUR system and don't feel compelled to upgrade constantly.

Just today (before I read your post) while I was playing Overlord I check my task manager and sure enough the processors were sitting happily at 100%
Most games also run greatly on this setup, I'm just going for the max performance out of this rig, as this is the last planned upgrade for a while. I originally bought an HP a6200n off amazon at a discount of some $300. After that I upgraded my RAM,added an extra hard drive, followed by a new Power Supply, then Graphics card, and now this processor. I was planning on building a new computer sometime in the next 3-4 years anyway, just trying to get this one as good as possible, so it could be used for a good while before it becomes out dated.

Just out of curiosity, what games are you playing and what performance are you getting?

Does it stay the same if you drop it to 16 x 10 or 12 x 10 resolution?

Recently I also bought a DVI to HDMI adapter so I could get higher resolutions on my monitor and upgrade from VGA. In Team Fortress 2, I ran it at 1440x900 with a minimum fps of 20-30. When I bumped up the resolution to 1980x1080 my performance increased to a minimum of 30-40 (I was happily surprised, but had heard that this card scales well). This also happened in Crysis at a higher resolution. though not aa much (barely 2-3 fps). Usually I play at 16:9, but played at 16:10 when I was using standard VGA

 

[Mousemonkey]

That was the CPU 'bottleneck'.

 

[megamanx00]

Yeah, just make sure to read the sticky and everything as far as overclocking. Anyway since you got a 13x multiplier you would need to only reach a bus speed of 231 to get a hair over 3.0GHz. It would be a mild 15% (well 15.5 to be exact anyway as a 230fsb would be 15%) overclock, but that can be the difference between playable(30-28 fps), and slightly unplayable (26-24fps)😀.

Anyway I had mine running at 3.08 with the stock cooler (ran it at 3.1 when it was cooler ) but now I have it at 3.24 with my 90mm Xigmatech rifle cooler and it even runs cooler despite the higher voltage 😀. If you're gonna push it over 3.0Ghz make sure you have some decent case ventilation and to of course watch your temps.

 

[andyKCIUK]

I spent a bit of time setting up Colin McRae: DIRT recently as I was getting quite sh1tty performance out of my PC. It doesn't have much to do with your thread, but still...

I game with vsync on, my monitor is 1280x1024@75Hz. My goal is to have 75FPS all the time, obviously. Changing various graphics settings in the game didn't help, so I started to overclock my e7200. Have a look:

min___max____avg________@
10____76____48.654____3.16 GHz
56____77____69.070____3.33 GHz
62____78____71.478____3.39 GHz
67____78____74.567____3.40 GHz
74____76____75.027____3.42 GHz

That's a nice example of CPU bottleneck... 😗