Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 Bottleneck?

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Pumbaa93

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Sep 8, 2013
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Hey guys, I bought a Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 and it arrives in the mail today, One thing I did not think about when I bought it was bottle necking, I also bought new Ram(G.Skill Ripjaws X F3-12800CL9D-8GBXL) It's 1600MHz memory, So I wouldn't think it would bottleneck my system. However I currently have an AMD Phenom II 955 BE(Stock clock speed of 3.2GHz) that is overclocked to 3.7GHz, additional pecs below:

Level 1 cache: 4 x 64 KB 2-way associative instruction caches
4 x 64 KB 2-way associative data caches
Level 2 cache: 4 x 512 KB 16-way associative caches
Level 3 cache: 6 MB shared 48-way associative cache

I am just wondering if this CPU will majorly bottleneck the new card, It is understandable if it does slightly. Also This processor is known to get a rather stable overclock of 4GHz with the appropriate cooling, Would an overclock like that stop the bottlenecking? Or should I just head out and purchase a new CPU?
 
Solution
photonboy
Bottlenecking also varies from game to game depending. A game like Skyrim might be far more demanding of the CPU than say a racing game.

To really know if you are bottlenecked you can find a REPEATABLE scenario in a game and do something like this:

1. Start FRAPS
2. Start GAME at a LOAD POINT
3. Immediately press the proper F-Key for FRAPS to start calculating the average frame rate (for a preset time such as THREE MINUTES)
4. STOP after the time has elapsed and write down the average FPS from the FRAPS folder.
5. REPEAT THREE TIMES.

Now, DOWNCLOCK your CPU by 500MHz or so. Then REPEAT the above. If you want an even better idea, downclock a 2nd time. So perhaps run at 3.5GHz, 3.0GHz, and 2.5GHz.

Analysis:
- If you see roughly the...
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photonboy

photonboy

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Jun 20, 2006
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Bottlenecking also varies from game to game depending. A game like Skyrim might be far more demanding of the CPU than say a racing game.

To really know if you are bottlenecked you can find a REPEATABLE scenario in a game and do something like this:

1. Start FRAPS
2. Start GAME at a LOAD POINT
3. Immediately press the proper F-Key for FRAPS to start calculating the average frame rate (for a preset time such as THREE MINUTES)
4. STOP after the time has elapsed and write down the average FPS from the FRAPS folder.
5. REPEAT THREE TIMES.

Now, DOWNCLOCK your CPU by 500MHz or so. Then REPEAT the above. If you want an even better idea, downclock a 2nd time. So perhaps run at 3.5GHz, 3.0GHz, and 2.5GHz.

Analysis:
- If you see roughly the SAME INCREASE in frame rate from 2.5->3.0 as 3.0->3.5 then overclocking will definitely help (and you are bottlenecking the GPU)

- If you see a much SMALLER increase in 3.0->3.5 then an overclock will help, but perhaps not by much

- If there is no improvement, there is no CPU bottleneck.

Keep in mind there may be more CPU-dependent parts of the game but this is a rough guide. You usually get a spike in CPU usage when more people or tanks etc come on the screen and the CPU has to calculate hit exchanges or possibly even CPU-physics.
 
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