What is bottlenecking my system?

AdmiralEspresso · Apr 10, 2014

GPU:
Hey guys. So this set up has been a work in progress over the past couple of years. I tried making this as clear as possible so it'd be easy for people to look at. Basically, I mainly play League of legends and starcraft 2. I'm big into the esports scene and enjoy the full streaming experience. I'd like a set up that allows me to play max settings and stream. I thought after my most recent upgrade this would be possible, but apparently not. I'm running 750watts of power. Thanks for any help, friends.

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EVGA 02G-P4-2680-KR GeForce GTX 680 2GB 256-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130768

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Processor:

AMD FX-8150 Zambezi 3.6GHz Socket AM3+ 125W 8-Core

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113284

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MOBO:

ASRock Fatal1ty 990FX Professional AM3+ AMD 990FX + SB950 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157267

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HardDrive:

Western Digital WD Blue WD5000AAKX 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136769

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RAM:

G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2133 (PC3 17000)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231476

photonboy · Apr 10, 2014

Hi,
First, look at THIS:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-processor-frame-rate-performance,3427-8.html

You don't give any numbers, however I can tell you that for Starcraft 2 your CPU is definitely the weakest link some of the time as you can see it gets maybe 80% the performance of a good Intel i5, and less compared to the very latest i5/i7's especially if they are overclocked and you aren't.

Starcraft 2 can't take advantage of more than two cores really so the more efficient Intel CPU cores are the reason they score higher.

SC2 actually had two benchmarks as the CPU could become the weakest link when battles got larger, but the Graphics might be the weakest link if you crank up the visuals so in some setups the bottleneck flip-flops during gameplay.

Streaming:
If you are using a software-based method then that can have a big impact on the CPU. I'm no expert as I don't understand why the unused CPU cores can't just handle that but you do still get a performance drop.

*Thus, streaming using NVidia's Shadowplay via Twitch is your best solution (about 5% performance hit).

Other:
I have an i7-3770K + GTX680 (Asus DC2U at 1200MHz) and have the settings maxed out though I can occasionally drop below 60FPS but that isn't often.

Hazle · Apr 10, 2014

your CPU. AMD's FX line of CPU don't perform all that well in CPU intensive games like SC2 due to the weaker per core performance over Intel.

LoL, to my understanding should run much better than SC2.

Krusher · Apr 10, 2014

I don't play either of those games so take this suggestion as-is: Your weakest part of the system is that you have a hard drive. Get an SSD; anything that loads lots of smaller files will see a drastic improvement. Tom's has some good reviews here on which ones work best (see their chart at the end).

photonboy · Apr 11, 2014

Krusher :

An SSD will help Windows startup and feel slightly snappier. It will however make little difference in most games, including the ones he mentioned.

Aside from the game starting and periodic loads (which average about 1.5 to 3x faster loading on SSD) it matters little because the game has been copied into the System RAM (DDR3) and rarely accessed the drive.

I've tested this on many games, and only use an SSD for a few games like Skyrim that have frequent map/building load points.

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What is bottlenecking my system?

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