worried about bottlenecking

[opio]

I just bought my little brother a GTX 980 for his birthday, he has an X58 chipset and a Core i7 920 running at 2.66ghz, also 12gb of triple channel ram running at 1066mhz, I'm just wondering if anything is getting bottlenecked. Is the CPU going to slow things down? What about the RAM? What about the fact that his card is in a pci-e 2.0 slot?

I reason I'm asking is because I want to overclock his system. Any input would be appreciated.

 

[pasow]

PCIe 2.0 will not be an issue. however the speed of the CPU will be a limiter depending on the title and resolution he games at. your RAM is fine, faster ram can help, but its such an incredibly marginal difference between fast RAM and slow in gaming its not worth changing after the fact.

I would aim for a good OC on the CPU. it should yield the largest performance benefit of any of the parts in it.



if you want to monitor how the systems behaving. grad some software like GPUz and HWMonitor. keep an eye on the loads for the CPU and GPU. depending on which ones maxing out can tell you which is your limiter. (GPUz can tell you a lot of detail of your GPU's utalization)

 

[fudgecakes99]

I just bought my little brother a GTX 980 for his birthday, he has an X58 chipset and a Core i7 920 running at 2.66ghz, also 12gb of triple channel ram running at 1066mhz, I'm just wondering if anything is getting bottlenecked. Is the CPU going to slow things down? What about the RAM? What about the fact that his card is in a pci-e 2.0 slot?

I reason I'm asking is because I want to overclock his system. Any input would be appreciated.

Well i'm running an i7 870 with a 980 ti. I don't think you have to worry about bottlenecking, too much. Granted if he had a newer skylake processor he'd see a significant bump in performance, but it's not as though he will be getting a terrible frame rate, so no as long as its 4 cores it's pretty much fine. He probably gets around 2.7ghz under load with turbo boost enabled i'm assuming. So it shouldn't be too bad.

 

[neblogai]

Overclock the CPU. Everything else is more than fine - no need to worry about pci-e 2.0 or RAM at all. If resolution you use is 1080p, CPU is the bottleneck- you will have playable frame rates, and you will be able to turn on all the eye candy- but overcloking the CPU will give you even higher frame rates.

 

[opio]

Overclock the CPU. Everything else is more than fine - no need to worry about pci-e 2.0 or RAM at all. If resolution you use is 1080p, CPU is the bottleneck- you will have playable frame rates, and you will be able to turn on all the eye candy- but overcloking the CPU will give you even higher frame rates.

"That was a waste of money. First off did you upgrade his PSU to support the card to at least 600W? If not he will have it shut down and probably already DAMAGING the chips on the 980. Second, YES EVERYTHING WILL BOTTLENECK. You got a ELEPHANT and trying to stuff it into a 2 seater Electric Car THEN worry about 'will it go slow?'.

Your running on SATA II, so no matter what you do, the 'code' stored on the drives has a very small 'lane' to load stuff, the 920 is very old and yes does NOT have the responsiveness of even of the Ivy Bridge, much less OLD Haswell, now 'old' Broadwell as they introduce the 6xxx series of iCores (Skylake) this month. So yeah, ALOT of bottlenecks and really your best bet would be to pick him up a 'cheap' i5 prebuilt from www.slickdeals.net, pop in the GTX 980 with a Bronze (better yet Tier 1 or 2) 600W PSU for $90 and he will be set."

I asked on a different forum and that's what some guy said, code being loaded over sata II? Plus my bro has an 850 watt psu. I just thought that was an asshole response that I don't think has any merit.

 

[coozie7]

^ Welcome to the internet.
There are plenty of opinionated idiots out there, and most of them seem to insist on spouting their nonsense/hate/idiocy over the cyber domain for all to see.
You are correct, that reply was from and asshole.

By SATA II he means the HDD interface, it's slow buy current top line standards but still faster than most consoles can manage, the result is the system will take a little longer to boot and load programs, don't sweat it.
A single PCI-E 2.0x16 link is more than enough for the fastest card currently available, there will be a tiny loss of performance
with the 'slow' 2.0 slot compared with a 'fast' 3.0 one but you'll need to run benchmarks to see it, to all practical intents and purposes there's no performance loss in a single card configuration.

Other replies here on the OC make perfect sense and match with my own experiences with a chip of the same generation (i5 750); At 3.4GHz it could drive a overclocked HD7950 just as fast as the review machines using CPUs that were two generations younger, falling behind slightly only in the few games that really taxed the CPU.

In a lot of cases the main bottleneck is likely to actually be the display, remember a 60Hz display can only show 60FPS no matter how many frames the system can actually produce, so don't forget to get your brother to use Vsync (better still the excellent Nvidia Adaptive Vsync option in the main drivers) to get rid of screen tearing.

 

[opio]

^ Welcome to the internet.
There are plenty of opinionated idiots out there, and most of them seem to insist on spouting their nonsense/hate/idiocy over the cyber domain for all to see.
You are correct, that reply was from and asshole.

By SATA II he means the HDD interface, it's slow buy current top line standards but still faster than most consoles can manage, the result is the system will take a little longer to boot and load programs, don't sweat it.
A single PCI-E 2.0x16 link is more than enough for the fastest card currently available, there will be a tiny loss of performance
with the 'slow' 2.0 slot compared with a 'fast' 3.0 one but you'll need to run benchmarks to see it, to all practical intents and purposes there's no performance loss in a single card configuration.

Other replies here on the OC make perfect sense and match with my own experiences with a chip of the same generation (i5 750); At 3.4GHz it could drive a overclocked HD7950 just as fast as the review machines using CPUs that were two generations younger, falling behind slightly only in the few games that really taxed the CPU.

In a lot of cases the main bottleneck is likely to actually be the display, remember a 60Hz display can only show 60FPS no matter how many frames the system can actually produce, so don't forget to get your brother to use Vsync (better still the excellent Nvidia Adaptive Vsync option in the main drivers) to get rid of screen tearing.

Thanks man