Skyrim bottleneck?

[Pirrewiet]

Hey Guys,

I just installed a Radeon 7750 over a Radeon 5570 and eventhough performance naturally increased I'm still not satisfied.
I want to be able to run the game at ultra settings and atleast 2x antialiasing and since stuttering still occurs quite frequently at the moment I'm wondering if I should return the 7750 or instead replace something else in my system.

I'm currently running with an AMD Phenom x4 945 (3 Ghz) Cpu and 4 Gibabyte Pc2-6400 memory.
Cheapest solution would probably be extra memory but would, eg, an additional 4 gigabyte of same type make much difference or would a different change be more efficient?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Pirrewiet]

Forgot to say:
have a Western Digital Caviar Black 7200 Rpm, 32mb cache, SATA-300 harddrive!

 

[jaideep1337]

Try overclocking that phenom to 3.5ghz and see if the FPS increases. Skyrim is a GPU heavy game. I have a PII 970 and a 550ti and I can run it at ultra with 2x AA at 40fps easily.

So try Ocing your CPU

 

[Pirrewiet]

Hey,

Good idea.
I have an Asus M3A78-EM motherboard though, not sure if it will reach that far?
http://www.asus.nl/Motherboards/AMD_AM2Plus/M3A78EM/#CPUS

My cooler is good for it though (have a big Zalman).

 

[Pirrewiet]

Regarding your fps; you have 1600mhz RAM, which comparably probably gives quite a boost by itself.

 

[jaguarskx]

You didn't say what your resolution was, but my suggestion is to overclock your CPU and get a faster graphics card. The Radeon HD 7750 is a mainstream graphics card which gives you good performance for the price that you pay. But you are expecting too much from it.

If you play at 1920x1080 resolution, then my recommendation would be for a Radeon HD 7850. If you don't want to spend $200 for a graphics card and if you do not have at least a good quality 500w PSU, then I wouldn't bother.

If you have at least a good quality 400w PSU, then consider the Radeon HD 7770 which will likely cost around $125. It has about 20% - 25% better performance than the Radeon HD 7750, but it can't do ultra w/o stuttering as well.

 

[Pirrewiet]

Set it running at 3550 Ghz but the system crashed during a 3d test. Need to look into the exact setting but generally a good idea!

Thinking about returning the 7750 and getting a 2nd hand Radeon 6870, not too much price difference and way faster.
But nobody mentions the Pc2-6400 ram though, isn't that the main bottleneck?

 

[Pirrewiet]

Oh 1920x1080 yes and have 460W Zalman (ZM460B-APS) PSU, which I probably will be needing with a 6870

Btw have the system at 3450 Ghz and is running fine atm! (43 degrees celcius)

 

[i8myhippo]

On your overclock (which is the way to go, as Skyrim is very CPU-intensive), make sure you increase voltage.

 

[Pirrewiet]

Hey guys,

Just wanted to say I first replaced it by a 650 ti (1gb) and later replaced that one with a Radeon 7850 (2gb). The latter is hugely superior and a heavy modded Skyrim pretty much runs flawlessly now eventhough the rest of my setup is still intact.