Question Why is my CPU bottlenecking my PC?

[kanishknishar]

My rig: www.bit.do/kanishkpc

When trying to play AC:O on high settings, I can't seem to even get consistent 60fps. My GPU usage as per the benchmark is only 60% but my CPU's usage is at 100%. I find this strange. Isn't i7700K supposed to be an ultra-end CPU? AC:O isn't the only game where I've seen the CPU usage hit 100%. I've also had my PC serviced by an engineer recently. He re-attached the cooler's paste.

Do I need a better processor?

 

[Dragos Manea]

There was a similar thread here on toms, the guy had exactly your cpu and your problems, he used a single stick of ram (single channel) from what i see so are you, this was his problem, when he added a second stick his performance improved by a large margin(double the fps).

 

[13thmonkey]

^ I was just about to point out the single stick..

 

[guanyu210379]

2700k, 3770k, 4770k, 4790k, 6700k and 7700k are all quite near to each other considering that they are from many generations.
Intel abused the system as AMD was practically not present during this period.

A very good performance jump can bee seen from 7700k (4/8) to 8700k (6/12) or 9700k (8/8), mainly due to the more included c/t. This happened after AMD is back into the game with the Ryzen and pushed Intel to do more to win the market.

Yes, your 7700k is not the super duper ultimate ultra-end gaming processor, especially if you compare it to I9 9900k.

 

[Karadjgne]

Dual channel doesn't offer any performance increase other than double the available bandwidth. For most applications, they are pretty much identical in every catagory. There's only one exception and that's IF running something that actually can saturate the available bandwidth of single channel, there's @ 20% performance increase by use of dual channel. Even quad channel gets the same thing as single channel, as the ram is not the choke point, the memory controller is.

AC just happens to be one of those applications.

 

[Olle P]

The easy way to increase frame rate is of course to drop the details settings a notch or two. You probably won't even notice the difference in eye-candy.

get your money back., shouldn't be over low 70s

You can't say that for sure without knowing about many other factors:
Room temperature? Cooler used? Case used? Case fans? ...

If I wanted to improve the performance, I'd have to overclock the CPU/GPU, correct?

CPU only, since that's the bottleneck.

My CPU showing 91st percentile means that my i7-7700K is performing better than 91% of i7700Ks tested by the software?

Not better than other with same CPU, but relative to all other registered systems.

... one thing slowing you down is your single channel RAM, ...

Dual channel doesn't offer any performance increase other than double the available bandwidth. ... the ram is not the choke point, the memory controller is.
AC just happens to be one of those applications.

Here I get a bit confused.
How come that CPU usage can be at/near 100% if it can't transfer data from/to RAM as fast as it does the computing?
Is the memory controller activity part of the monitored "CPU-activity"?

 

[-Fran-]

Holy cow... Why would anyone treat any i7 after the 4770K like obsolete garbage? I'm sincerely shocked! xD

I do agree on the comments about Assassin's Creed being a garbage game and try to check what Windows is actually doing while you're playing your games. If you make your Windows installation lean and clean, you will not have issues; or at the very least, the perceived quality of the game won't be as bad. Unless you're a person that looks at numbers on the screen and screams on the inside when the FPS'es go down by 2 or 3 when you're over 90.

As for more specific solutions:

• Game Bar and XBox stuff should be disabled, really... That thing is just garbage that adds ZERO value to a gamer.
• While running the game, alt-tab from time to time and check what processes are running in the background. I strongly suggest you get familiar with Process Explorer (google it; pick the Microsoft link).
• Just be reasonable with the amount of stuff you have running in the background while you game (Chrome and 30 tabs? bad idea!). Although you have 16GB, it's running in Single Channel mode, so the more stuff you put there, the slower the access times will be. You CPU is fast enough to manage everything just fine, but if you're working on Single Channel mode, it's hampered with the more RAM utilization you have.
• Check BIOS updates and what they've changed.

As for Overclocking... I strongly believe you don't need it, but I would argue that getting proper Dual Channel ram will help you when the programs running in the background start needing memory.

Cheers!