CHALLENGE. gtx690 + DDR2 GEN3 BOARD/RAM + CORE2 QUAD 2.66 q9450@3.6 NEED ALL THE FPS.

[Adeptwa]

I'm retiring my current computer that's served me for 5~6 years.

I want to set this up as a spare computer. With battlefield 4 running on a 120htz+ monitor at as high frames as possible. 100+ for motion blur reduction on as high settings as possible.

I need some help to work out why i am getting really bad FPS with such a good card.

Here are the specs.
Core 2 quad q9450 2.66 base clocked at 3.6.
XFX 780i
ASUS gtx 690 (fresh addition)
Corsair dominator 1066 ddr2 ram 4x2 gb sticks. @800 mhz.
650watt cooler masterpower supply (took a 1200 out for power saving reasons)
Regular sata hard drive (500 at the moment)
coolermaster cosmos s1000.
Corsair hs80.
Benq 2720t.


I currently can't/don't want to spend any more money on this as I have a brand new i7-3960x build half done and an 80% built xeon e5-2650. So all notable amount of funds will be getting these up and running first.

I will be quick to reply with any thing u want me to show you. I have kombuster, after burner, occt, realtemp, gpu and cpuz etc etc tell me what you want =)

 

[Eduello]

Quite simply, your CPU is horrible. DDR2 RAM is also not a good idea. Try disabling SLI in your Nvidia control panel and see what that does (GTX 690 is two 680s in SLI). What are your temperatures?

Make sure you are not setting the resolution scale in BF4 over 100%.

 

[rolli59]

You are not saving any power swapping PSU's, components will only pull what they need and power consumption is the same whether you have 650 or 1200watt PSU!
CPU bottleneck is most likely your biggest problem. I personally would not run that card on anything less than a modern I5 setup.

 

[cst1992]

components will only pull what they need and power consumption is the same whether you have 650 or 1200watt PSU

True, except for efficiency.
A 1200Gold should draw less power at load than a 650Bronze. But the guy who's got money to spend on a 1200Gold will get all golds or platinums anyway!

 

[Adeptwa]

Thank you for both of the last comments.

I found a really good PROFSAVE_profile for bf4 that disables heaps of stuff that you can only set to low/can't even set in bf4 so i am now getting a good 50+ fps on low/medium.

I really want to push this machine to the limits, i get less fps when disabling one of the GPU's. I overclocked the GPU by from 915 base to 930 on air. (All im comfortable with could water cool it).


I know i must be able to push this thing a little further. Would ram timings, or anything what so ever that's overclockable increase it by a decent amount? If not, what video card should i put in this thing to retire it. I think i may be limited by the cache overhead of my CPU. Not 100% sure on that but googles lead me to believe that.

 

[cst1992]

The core 2 duo's/quads just don't have the single-core power required to handle current games.
If you want a comparison, my old Core 2 Duo e4600 gives a single core performance of 12 Gigaflops whereas my brother's i3 2100 gives performance of 65 Gigaflops. And we're talking about a Sandy Bridge i3 here.
Some of the high-end i7's benchmarks show them crack 154 Gigaflops of performance.

If not, what video card should i put in this thing to retire it.

If you're going to use it, a 750Ti is plenty. If not, I don't see any use in investing further in this old PC.