My weakest link... where is it?

[Mjolnir]

WoW is a CPU intensive game. Most MMOs are especially for heavy raid scenes.

What about D3? How does that run? Or anything newer.

 

[slowcaveman]

 

[caddi daddi]

4.2 on a stock cooler is that thing frying?
post up hardware monitor cpuz, three tabs, processor, memory and spd.
this thing must be getting hot, 3.8 is about it on a stock cooler.

 

[slowcaveman]

Sorry I sure messed that one up, is there a way to link the Cpu Z by photo without uploaded to a 3rd party?

 

[caddi daddi]

yea click edit and take that out then click go advanced and you will find it.

 

[Dlaw]

He did say in his first post that he had it under a "very good" cooler. What cooler is that, by chance?

 

[slowcaveman]

Its in a HAFX full case with 3 extra "pressure, inlet" fans using a coolermaster V8 cpu cooler and soon if reviews look good upgrading the gtx 670 ftw to a atric acelero dual . Temps have always been low as mentioned in the beginning of the post. The new 670 is running at 58 degrees after 4 hours of being on and about 3 hours of WoW.

 

[slowcaveman]

So as you can see my CPU isn't running at max, and the temps are ok. Im planning on getting another cooler for the gpu, but for now under load I'm not close to the 97C. The thing that I'm currious about is the top left number on the screen. The gpu core clock is scaling down to 850 and as low as 495, this cards is clocked at 1006 stock and never scales up that high. what would cause the card to "limit" its clock? Does it not see the need to rev up? I started playing black ops 3 but only in single player mode (just got it and don't want to get owned yet) and with the graphics set to the highest on 1080 it holds right at 58-60 single player. Ill play it and post more pics

 

[slowcaveman]

This is a 10 min Furmark max 1080 stable run of 10min with the gpu hitting its maxxed out temps at 77C. As you can the this maxes out one core of my cpu, and ramped up the gpu to max clock speed. Hope all this info helps. Since there are so many pic should I remove them once people get a chance to look to save space?

 

[Dlaw]

Looks to me like a CPU bottleneck.

 

[Hicksimus]

Yes, assuming your FPS isn't limited to something like 60 in the pictures in post #28 then you are almost certainly experiencing a significant CPU bottleneck. There are lots of games out there that look good on the surface but are terrible under the hood, and the Phenom II line is showing its age(especially against Intel). I'm not saying that a 4GHz Phenom II X4 will always limit a 670 to under 60FPS in gaming but in gaming it will almost always(if not always) limit a 670 to less than its full potential.

 

[Special7]

You're running your CPU-NB at only 2GHz, you should be running it at 2.6GHz or better, running at 2GHz is definitely hindering your performance a bit.

 

[Gibbs989]

See the setup in my sig, if its in your budget I would recomend the fx 6300 I mostly use my rig to play WoW as I already had the other games I play for my ps3 prior to building it. with this setup OC to 4.5Ghz I never drop below 100fps out in the world and running dungeons etc. I Play on a Illidan one of the most highly populated servers and in major cities with thousands of people hanging around my fps is never below 40 this is with everything on ultra in 1080p.

 

[dtrunk]

look closely at the GPU chart and you'll see that your GPU fan only maxes out at >> 53% << WTF! i would see if you can increase this in speed fan, or use something like (precision x?) to change the fan curve so that it kicks up to speed sooner and to a higher speed. you still need to fine tune your OC on your cpu it looks like.

 

[Anonaru]

Guild Wars 2, Aion Online, City of Heros (Not as badly), Rift, World of Warcraft, HoN (Not as badly) are CPU dependant titles.

These games will not work as well as they should in cities and heavy-load enviroments, where the age of Phenom really begins to shine. For example, Aion Online dropped down to at times 1-2FPS in cities while things load. On an 8350, the lowest it goes is 40ish. Max FPS is basically the same. This would happen to be on 670s in SLI, no chance its GPU related.

These kinds of games are where new AMD and Intel processors really shine, much more so than most non MMO games. A few other games that suffer greatly from older or weaker CPUS are Planetside 2, FSX, and to a lesser extent, Far Cry 3. There are others, but these are fairly new titles.

 

[slowcaveman]

Ok, so after reading a few replies last night I did some rework to my OC. I was able to get my NB up to 2540 stable with a slight voltage increase ( NB & HT). Even through changing my cpu frequency to 211 no matter what I did I couldn't brake 2600. How safe of a voltage increase can you do to the NB before I fry it? Is there a safe rule of thumb every place I've looked gives you advice on overclocking says "keep raising slowly until you hit your performance cap". Everything I've learned is of trial and error, and this is only my first real rig I've really tried to tweak so any info or guidance is extremely helpful. Once I got the frequency bumped up to a solid boot, I ran passmarks full bench test from my older OC my overall score improved by 200 points. The FPS in the benchmark improved by 7 FPS. Thats a good chunk in my book. So now my next step would be to try to tighten my ram setting right? Chances are to get the results I'm after I'm going to have to buy a new CPU and Mobo, but until I can spend the cheddar and do it the way I would like I might as well learn on a system I dont care about. Well as long as I don't mess up my new GPU that is. Thanks again for all the help guys. And I checked into my fan speed the fans rpm maxes out at 2k so im not sure why it says its running at 50% that fan doesn't appear to be able to run at 4500 rpm.

 

[LZ_Xray]

Guild Wars 2... City of Heros, Rift, World of Warcraft...are CPU dependant titles.

A few other games that suffer greatly from older or weaker CPUS are Planetside 2... There are others, but these are fairly new titles.

Out of Anon's list, these are the ones I've played and can corroborate that they are all pretty CPU-dependant to some degree. CoH not as much since I haven't played it in years but the rest I've played recently. I don't know for sure but seems like MMORPGs as a whole tend to be more CPU dependant than MMOFPSs.

Rift and WoW I tried at 1080 on an A6 APU machine I built for my sister first on the IGPU and then with a 6850, and with WoW the FPS difference at low settings was very small. The only real difference was I could crank the graphic quality quite a bit higher with the 6850 before the FPS started dropping. Classic CPU limited behavior. Rift was basically unplayable in high traffic areas with either.

 

[storm-chaser]

Ok, so after reading a few replies last night I did some rework to my OC. I was able to get my NB up to 2540 stable with a slight voltage increase ( NB & HT). Even through changing my cpu frequency to 211 no matter what I did I couldn't brake 2600. How safe of a voltage increase can you do to the NB before I fry it?

Set FSB back to 200, even a couple MHz over isn't worth it -- you want to focus on the cpu-nb running at 2800 or 3000, and ram speed/timings for best case throughput on your system. In order for this config to run stable on my Biostar T series board I had the NB voltage bumped to 1.24 and the cpu-nb @ 1.34 to 1.400, temps good. Newer boards have much more headroom in terms of the durability of the circuits, allowing for higher voltages and temps and overclocks. Your gigabyte bios and settings will be different but the hardware is the same at the core. Detune your CPU multi a notch in order to test reliability of the NB. If you can get your CPU-NB stable, try to trim the timings down and use 90ns memory response times instead of stock 110 or 320. Attempt using the 1T command rate, see these screenshots (use aida64 to benchmark or torture test. - even though I have the X6 in these, I did it the same with a 965 x4):




http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v423/smithsil/NB%20
memory latency:
comparison/memlatencynb3000.jpg
Memory copy:

 

[slowcaveman]

Well I put the Cpu frequency back to 200 and changed the NB and HT multiplier only. I was able to bump up the NB to 2450 from 2000 stable with my core cpu running at 4.1. This increased my FPS by 7 in my test! To me that's a huge upgrade for "free". With that being said I messed with my ram timings with little to no luck so far. With that much of a increase I'm starting to wonder if maybe I should just spend the cash and just do a full 8350 mobo and cpu build. Is messing with my ram and fine tuning my cpu / mobo really going to get another drastic improvement or should I just step up and buy a current cpu. Any last thoughts? Thanks again for all the great help I've learned a ton in just this short forum