Will a core i7 7700k bottleneck a gtx 1080ti?

[Arnout_2]

So i'm gonna build my new rig and I need to know if a core i7 7700k will bottleneck a gtx 1080ti on 1080p?

 

[bystander]

The short answer is NO. I built that rig two weeks ago: i7 7700K, EVGA 1080ti SC2 (I got the SC2 cause I'm gonna build a custom loop and thought the FTW was unnecessary in that case), and a T2 Plat 850w EVGA PSU...I've stressed tested it, gamed hard on 4K ultra, benchmarked on cinebench, all the firestrikes and timespy, etc barf infinitum no problems. It's match made in gamer heaven tbh. It's probably conceivable that the 1080ti could bottleneck the 7700K, but I haven't run into it yet. Incidentally I'm running a Maximus IX mobo and oced my 7700k to a stable 5100 MHz by clicking on one button. Now it's holding at 28 to 30 degrees idle, and the hottest the GPU has gotten (on air) is around 80 degrees when I oced it to 2010 MHz 5000+ MHz on the V-RAM. I'll probably get my chip delidded as it seems I did very well in the lottery (on the GPU too, it seems), and then I'll be able to push it further on the new loop...So don't overthink this...JUST DO IT! lol <3

I'm not sure you noticed, but he's only gaming at 1080p, not 4K. There is a huge difference in bottleneck potential between 1080p and 4K.

 

[Karadjgne]

There is. At 4k, you'll stress the gpu, limiting it to only what it can handle graphics wise. The side affect of this is that the cpu doesn't have to work as hard, as fps take a nosedive. At 1080p, that gpu is gonna run wide open fps, making the cpu actually raise load %. It sounds backwards, but it's not. The cpu shunts a certain amount of info to the gpu per frame. Does not really matter if it's 4k or 1080p, the cpu doesn't care, it's not really affected. The gpu, however, is hugely affected since its got to quadruple the amount of ppi. So in a sense, at 1080p, on a game like BF1, it's possible to see 100% cpu usage, yet stick that on a 4k monitor and you'll barely be over 50% cpu usage. This is very common in the i5's with limited cores/threads and uber powerful gpus at 1080p.
In a sense, it's a bottleneck, in reality it's just too much power with no place to go.

 

[John_561]

Oops! Well, the only valid reason to even get a 1080 ti is gaming at 4K. Any other reason is a waste of money. And, I'll stop you right there Taylor, don't try to out argue me. That's also the opinion of Kingpin, Linus, Jay, Gamers Nexus and everyone else who knows more about hardware than the vast majority of people on this site. If you're gaming at 1080p you definitely don't need a ti tbh. I got it for 4K and VR and it destroys both. It's the single best single card solution outside of the new titan 1000 series refresh which is a waste of money for the FPS game (like 5 or 6 fps, REALLY Nvidia?)

 

[Jorge Nascimento]

Well that particular thing can happen if your streaming and playing high demanding games. There are situations where the I7 is not enough with its extra weak threads, and remember the 6 and 7 generations of of I5/I7 have problems of threads not working at all due to bugs.
After few years building pc's for some gamers and streamers, but mostly high demanding workstations, I have been seeing I7 bottlenecking with top tear graphics, that includes quadros and AMD pro (the 4C/8T version). three friends of mine for whom i have built pcs have just moved to ryzen, 1 of them to ryzen 7 and the other tow for ryzen 5 1600X. All of them stream and play and from what i have seen and tested as month go by I7 4C/8T is becoming useless for streaming, its always near 100% and that cause breaks and latency sometimes. With the 6C/12T and 8C/16T from ryzen that does not happen, yes lower clocks, but the amd cpu are beasts compared to the over priced I7 that has a very bad performance/price and performance over all if your doing more then just gaming. Contrary to many people higher clocks does not mean better, more cores overcome that, as many professional programs already take advantage of multiple physical cores, as the gaming industry is slowing moving to the same predicament.
This happen with DX12 last year in just 2 or 3 games, now everything is coming with DX12 that makes a budget RX480/580 very close to a 1070 on dx12, not even talking about vulkan that makes that amd graphic perform better then a 1070 by a very tiny margin. Comparing to a 1070 running dx11 in some games, because using dx12 will make nvidia perform worst then dx11.
This is a shame cause i have 980TI and the graphic was suposed to be dx12 ready and just before my graphic hit the 2 years mark i stopped getting improvements in the newer drivers.... I am glad RX vega is coming so i can finally do an upgrade that will last me more then 2 years.

 

[Michael Piazza]

"At 1080p, a gtx 1080ti is going to cause CPU bottlenecks in some games, no matter what CPU is used."

Not entirely accurate. A gpu cannot cause a bottleneck in anything other than the monitor, bottlenecks are a squash in the flow of info, basically cpu-gpu-monitor, not backwards. It's only components before the cpu that can cause this to happen, mainly it's the game itself, it's optimization, drivers, engine, coding etc even add on settings like AA or physX or hairworks that'll bog a cpu down. Nothing to do with the gpu, a 1080ti is simply powerful enough to translate everything fed to it from the cpu, whereas lesser cards struggle to keep up. If your cpu is hitting 100% or close, and the gpu isn't, there's an issue. Either there gpu is seriously overpowered for the system or there's something dragging the cpu down. But it'll never be the gpu causing the cpu issues.

What the heck are you talking about?

If the game code is harder on the CPU than the GPU, that's a bottleneck.

A bottleneck has nothing to do with the GPU causing the CPU issues, or the other way around. A bottleneck is when one component is holding back performance, while another is capable of doing more. If the game is more CPU intensive than GPU intensive, it'll hold back performance.

You are describing a bottleneck, whether you want to blame coding for it or not, it's a bottleneck.

Huh? Such generalizations like that don't help anyone. Just because the game may be more CPU intensive than GPU intensive does NOT automatically make the CPU a bottleneck UNLESS the CPU/Memory combination is not of a high enough spec or frequency to handle all the instructions being thrown at it or cannot physically move those instructions thru the the processing pipeline fast enough. This can happen even if the game is multi-threaded but it will most frequently happen if the game is poorly optimized, only designed for single core or in either of the above cases, you are trying to run the game on a CPU never designed to handle that kind of a load. If the affected CPU cores are not being constantly slammed at 100% and the GPU can handle everything thrown its way by the CPU then there is no bottleneck.

 

[Slumy__57]

This thread has already been down the toilet several times, no need to revive it and run it back again. The OP's question was solved a long time ago, and the OP hasn't even posted on this thread for two and a half months. Just let it die.

 

[theonerm2]

A very simple answer. The CPU will determine the maximum frame rate in any game. So the better the CPU the better the potential maximum frame rate. Right now IPC and clock speed is king in the gaming world. So the Core i7 7700K is the best you can get. There will be exceptions though. Games that can use many cores will do better with CPU's that have more cores. Generally I wouldn't worry all too much. The 7700K can push super high frame rates.

 

[USAFRet]

5 year old thread.

If you have questions or concerns, please start a NEW thread for your particular hardware.