Is my CPU being the bottleneck?

Palligretar

Honorable
May 26, 2013
4
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10,510
I recently got a Gigabyte 7950 and I must say that the performance is not what I expected. I suspect that this has something to do with my CPU.

Specs:
AMD FX-6300 3.5ghz
MSI 970A-G43
Gigabyte 7950 3gb version
8gb of 1600mhz corsair ram
120gb SSD
1tb Seagate Barracuda.
Thermaltake 750W PSU.


What I am experiencing which I find odd and may help you get a better clue of what is going on:

I will be running battlefield. Most settings are low with the occasional medium and high. FPS will go anywhere from 100 to an average of 60-70 and then crash into 40 in particular maps. GPU usage according to MSI Afterburner shows that the GPU is utilizing little of the memory but the core clock and memory clock are as one would expect.

However the CPU will be hitting about 70%-80% all the time and memory about 4gb.

Any suggestions on how to stabilize my fps because these drops are freakishly annoying and to be honest I was expecting better performance from the card.
 

8350rocks

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Have you turned on V-Sync?
 

Xoo00o0o0o

Honorable
May 26, 2013
1
0
10,510
It sounds like your CPU is either defective, underclocked, or a background process is eating up processor cycles. You can check for processor clock in the bios. A FX-6300 should NOT bottleneck a 7950 in a proper system.
 

8350rocks

Distinguished
Make sure your catalyst drivers are the newest version as well...I think Catalyst v13.4 is the newest "official" version, I don't believe v13.5 is out of beta yet, though you can install those anyway. Just keep in mind, drivers in beta will be good, but may have some bugs in them here and there.
 

8350rocks

Distinguished
I doubt that's the issue...

Do you have anything CPU intensive running in the background...(for example antivirus/malware)?

If you do, check to see if it has a "gaming mode"

Additionally...try doing this:

Open your task manager from ctrl+alt+del menu. Select the game you're running and right click then click on go to process.

On the next tab, the process is highlighted (should come up instantly)...then right click and go to set priority. Select high/real time, then play your game. If that does not change anything, it is definitely not something with the CPU (poorly optimized game perhaps).

If it does fix it, then there is probably a background process eating up your CPU cores and you can do some digging to figure out what it is.