CPU/Mobo Will AMD 955BE be bottleneck with GTX960 ?

vyral_143

vyral_143

Jarvis
Staff member
Super Mod
After my recent event with SMPS, I have got some time to think about different aspects of current assembled rig. There are multiple questions which I have posted in various sections.

However this one is a quite confusing. How much juice is left with my processor for gaming ?

Complete specs of my system:
AMD Phenom II X4 955BE with CM Hyper 212 EVO
Asus M5A97 R2.0
Corsair Vengeance 8GB 1600MHz
Sapphire HD6950 unlocked to HD6970 2GB
Display: Dell ST2220L @ 1080p

I will be getting Crucial MX100 256GB SSD this week. I am thinking to install games on SSD. Apart from that I can OC my proccy till 3.8GHz - stable. Generally I play games like CoD, Battlefield, Assasin's Creed, Crysis, GTA 4 and Metro 2033. However looking forward to try Metro: Last Light, Watch Dogs, Far Cry series, Batman Arkham series, some racing games from NFS and Company of Heroes 2.
 
SSD will not improve your gaming performance (apart from load times) Hardly noticeable change in FPS for the amount you pay - so installing games on SSD will only help in fast loads and not smoother plays. SSD is a great investment, just not justified for only gaming. :)

You have a high end GPU so there are chances your CPU will bottleneck your performance. Make do until you can and then go FX 8350[DOUBLEPOST=1413462354][/DOUBLEPOST]am not sure i answered your question :happy:
 
SSD will help in gaming, contrary to popular belief, if you have the game data loaded to it which most people don't.

Level load times reduce significantly and this may be an advantage for games that need it, like Deus Ex 3 and some of the NFS titles. In some games with in-level loading like Skyrim you will definitely notice an increase. However keep in mind that if you load and save games from SSD you are running through the wear cycles and this may have consequences in terms of total life.

I run a 970 at 4GHz and a two 6970s in crossfire at a little more than twice your resolution, the cards are mildly overclocked. Seems to me the graphics is still the bottleneck, except in some games which are more CPU-dependant. At 1920 thing yoyo a bit more between CPU and GPU than at 2560x, but I would think that for most games you will still be bottlenecked by the GPU, specially in newer games which run with most of the shader power unlocked.

IME a game like Grid Autosport uses much more shader power than say NFS, and this is quite apparent when I look at the power being drawn from the UPS. Never crossed 600W but with this game I see figures in the 700W+ range, the only difference being the game. That's where the extra 100w goes. Obviously designers have come round to using all the features of DX11 and it shows in the power draw. The good thing is that CPU utilisation goes down as shader power is utilised more efficiently.

For gamers I don't really see why a new investemnt would be better spent on the AMD setups. After a decade of loyalty I have begun to farm out my various tasks to the Intel camp, first with small low power machines, then the server. The HTPC followed as did the DAW, and now only my gaming setup is AMD-based. The upgrade would definitely be Intel if I can afford it. Even an entry-level i5 beats the 8350 (Performance per watt as my resolution still depends mostly on GPU) so if AMD are not able to compete with it by the end of the year I will probably move.
 
Bumping year old thread,

I have got Asus STRIX GTX960 2GB DDR5 OC version from Amazon. I am wondering if my AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE can still cop up with new games and does not cause a bottleneck ? If it does, what cheapest options do I have ? I am open to move to Intel platform.
 
I think you are good, you won't notice any difference apart from few games which makes more use of CPU, so game up!
 
Install msi afterburner, enable gpu usage and clocks in osd and then check if the cpu is holding them back. If gpu usage is less than 95% then you are cpu limited.

I just upgraded my brother's pc. It was running an e6600 at 3.3ghz and a 750 ti was terribly cpu limited by that cpu. An x2 555 is even slower so I think a 960 would most definitely be cpu limited.
 
Go ahead it wont bottlneck unless the game is CPU demanding.

BTW I too have near about identical config in terms of ram, monitor and just my amd is tri-core.
So me too thinking of upgrading the GPU only as I hardly game once a year or so.
So this thread might very well help people like us.
 
vyral_143 said:
Bumping year old thread,

I have got Asus STRIX GTX960 2GB DDR5 OC version from Amazon. I am wondering if my AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE can still cop up with new games and does not cause a bottleneck ? If it does, what cheapest options do I have ? I am open to move to Intel platform.
Click to expand...
Its better to move to Intel Platform.
So you can go with the following:

Intel Core i5 4440 -11500,
MSI H97 PC Mate -6500.
TOTAL -18,000.
 
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