[SOLVED] Upgrade Suggestion?

kekohofficial

Prominent
Dec 7, 2017
11
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510
Heres my build:
i7 6700(Non-K) 3.4GHz
Asus H170 Gaming Mobo
MSI GTX 1080TI
16GB of Ram
1TB SSD
1TB HDD

Explanation:
my CPU is the oldest thing I have in this build and when I play games I feel it is limiting my GPU a lot, I run wallpaper engine and sometimes it can go up to 100% in usage, I feel like its really bottlenecking my GPU and limiting its performance as I was told that it could bottleneck in 1080p (what I play in) ... And if I need an upgrade what should I get upgraded for cpu. Any suggestions for upgrade? Any suggestion for the cpu?
 
Solution
I use Rainmeter on a i7-3770k without any issues. That 6700 shouldn't be having any issues with a simple wallpaper engine. This is true especially considering the wallpaper engine should be non-functional when the pc is active like in a game situation that's running full-screen. I could see it possibly damping down slightly in window'd mode, but that's all. If anything I'd say to check ram usage, wallpaper engines can have memory leaks which would force windows to use large amounts of pagefile, which definitely would affect gaming performance.

Not that many games will drive a i7 of any gen to 100% usage, they just aren't coded that way and won't be until 4 core cpus are as ancient as dual core are now.

Cpu pre-render frames. Sets the...
The i7-6700 should hold quite well in a lot of tasks. Without confirmation, but I would imagine the i7-7700k is the faster CPU you could upgrade to with a BIOS update.

However, if Wallpaper Engine is using that much I suspect something is going wrong there. I'd start with software issues before upgrading.
 

RCFProd

Expert
Ambassador
I mean, not really a big chance of that happening. Pretty sure your GTX 1080 Ti can run up to Its best ability most of the time with a pretty recent Intel i7 CPU.

Some software in the background, like that wallpaper engine or something, shouldn't be using that much CPU at all. That looks like a software issue at the moment.
 

Karadjgne

Titan
Ambassador
I use Rainmeter on a i7-3770k without any issues. That 6700 shouldn't be having any issues with a simple wallpaper engine. This is true especially considering the wallpaper engine should be non-functional when the pc is active like in a game situation that's running full-screen. I could see it possibly damping down slightly in window'd mode, but that's all. If anything I'd say to check ram usage, wallpaper engines can have memory leaks which would force windows to use large amounts of pagefile, which definitely would affect gaming performance.

Not that many games will drive a i7 of any gen to 100% usage, they just aren't coded that way and won't be until 4 core cpus are as ancient as dual core are now.

Cpu pre-render frames. Sets the fps limit. It can only do so many frames in a second. Then it sends those frames to the gpu, which has to paint the picture according to resolution and detail settings. The resolution has exactly nothing to do with the cpu, whether it's 720p or 5k, that's all on the gpu. So if a cpu can pre-render 100 frames in a second, it sends all 100 frames to the gpu. At 1080p, most gpus the size of a 1080ti have absolutely no issues putting out 100fps. At 4k, it will. The only things that'll bottleneck a cpu are what's in front of it. Ram, storage, game code. If those only allow 60fps pre-rendered frames, that's all that gets sent to the gpu. That's not a cpu issue, that's a badly optimized game, the cpu is doing all it can do.

You can make any cpu, even a i9-9900k bottleneck, there's plenty of evidence showing that the more powerful HEDT cpus have better gaming fps, or production times.

But with lower resolutions like 1080p, there's more emphasis on the cpu simply because there's less usage on a gpu as powerful as a 1080ti, the cpu output becomes the limiting factor. In high resolution such as 4k, the cpu is still putting out the same frame limits, but all the emphasis is now on the gpu which is now struggling to live upto the cpus fps limit.

That's not a bottleneck, that's just how it is. Nothing wrong or underpowered about an i7-6700.
 
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