Question Will an i9 9900 bottleneck a 3070 Ti?

wasted854091

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Oct 18, 2020
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Will an i9 9900 (non K or KF) bottleneck a 3070 Ti?

The i9 9900 is the max supported i9 for my motherboard (TUF B365M Plus Gaming) and I want the BEST possible. The i9 9900K isn't supported according to my MOBO support page. But I'm just going off of that.

So will this CPU bottleneck my GPU? I currently have an i5 9400f with the 3070 Ti and it's nice but I know it's bottlenecking me on a lot of newer games. Still getting over 60fps+ on 1440p ultra settings but CPU usage usually in the 90s while GPU is in the 60s. And some older games too.

Thansk for any help or even just advice you guys can offer an up and coming scrub like me! Lol
 

Karadjgne

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Yes and no. Got nothing to do with the cpu or gpu, but has everything to do with the game itself.

Every game you play that's bogging down the 9400 will also possibly bog down the 9900, just to a much lesser degree. Could be as little as zero bog because there's enough cores or Lcache, or be close to the same amount of bog due to lousy optimization or its just an AMD strong game.

And your current cpu isn't 'bottlenecking' your gpu, it's just that the games in particular that you are playing happen to be more cpu bound than gpu bound. Slap a 4k DSR on the global settings or in GeForce Experience, and that'll change. Enable Raytracing, that'll change.

Can't blame the cpu for low fps when the gpu isn't fully utilized by your settings.
 
Will an i9 9900 (non K or KF) bottleneck a 3070 Ti?

The i9 9900 is the max supported i9 for my motherboard (TUF B365M Plus Gaming) and I want the BEST possible. The i9 9900K isn't supported according to my MOBO support page. But I'm just going off of that.

So will this CPU bottleneck my GPU? I currently have an i5 9400f with the 3070 Ti and it's nice but I know it's bottlenecking me on a lot of newer games. Still getting over 60fps+ on 1440p ultra settings but CPU usage usually in the 90s while GPU is in the 60s. And some older games too.

Thanks for any help or even just advice you guys can offer an up and coming scrub like me! Lol
It really depends on what frequency it were to run at when all cores were loaded. If you had no power limits in place and it were to run in it's PL2 state permanently at 4.6Ghz when gaming, then no it should handle the card quite well and should be a substantial improvement over what you have.
 

wasted854091

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Oct 18, 2020
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It really depends on what frequency it were to run at when all cores were loaded. If you had no power limits in place and it were to run in it's PL2 state permanently at 4.6Ghz when gaming, then no it should handle the card quite well and should be a substantial improvement over what you have.

Sounds interesting. How would one enable that? If you don't mind breaking it down midly for me lol
 

shady28

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Jan 29, 2007
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Will an i9 9900 (non K or KF) bottleneck a 3070 Ti?

The i9 9900 is the max supported i9 for my motherboard (TUF B365M Plus Gaming) and I want the BEST possible. The i9 9900K isn't supported according to my MOBO support page. But I'm just going off of that.

So will this CPU bottleneck my GPU? I currently have an i5 9400f with the 3070 Ti and it's nice but I know it's bottlenecking me on a lot of newer games. Still getting over 60fps+ on 1440p ultra settings but CPU usage usually in the 90s while GPU is in the 60s. And some older games too.

Thansk for any help or even just advice you guys can offer an up and coming scrub like me! Lol


The 3080 is pretty close to the 3070 Ti, and TPU uses the 3080 for their tests. You can see the results on recent CPU reviews, the 9900 would be a little slower than a 10700K on this review.

This is at 1440P - vs the 12600K they were reviewing it would on average lose around 7.7 fps. At 1080P it loses about 10% FPS.

A 3070 Ti probably won't lose quite that much as it's a little slower than a 3080, and it's probably not noticeable to a normal person.

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-core-i5-12600k-alder-lake-12th-gen/16.html


relative-performance-games-2560-1440.png
 
Sounds interesting. How would one enable that? If you don't mind breaking it down midly for me lol
If your not familiar with Intel's boost behaviour. Essentially modern Intel CPU's have two main power states, PL1 and PL2. PL1 is related to the base speed which for the 9900 is 3.1Ghz at 65W, it can run at this permanently. PL2 is related to the turbo boost speed and raises the TDP limit from 65W to if I remember correctly 220W. In this mode the 9900 can run at 4.6Ghz on all cores. However by default the duration for PL2 is normally limited to around 60 seconds before the CPU drops back to it's PL1 state. This is done to limit the CPU's sustained power draw and heat dissipation.

If you bought a pre-built machine this is generally how the CPU would behave. However on some motherboards it's possible to manually adjust the PL1/PL2 power limits in the bios. Typically those building a custom PC would simply remove the TDP and time limit for the PL2 state to ensure the CPU runs at maximum performance when under sustained load, in fact on higher end motherboards this is normally done by default.

However your ability to do this does depend on what board you have, unfortunately I can't see it mentioned anywhere for your board. Running the CPU in it's PL2 state under a sustained load like gaming will also require very substantial cooling for a high end CPU like an i9. A large tower air cooler or 280mm AIO liquid cooler would be advisable.