gtx 980 SLI bottleneck?

zqa20 · Sep 19, 2014

I have a 3570k and I'm wondering if this would bottleneck 980 in SLI

tambeshakunt · Sep 19, 2014

Yes it definitely would if you are doing 2+ way SLI. You really need a top of the line i7 to get max performance with such a setup.

zqa20 · Sep 19, 2014

That kinda sucks didn't think a 3570k would bottleneck ;/

dgingeri · Sep 19, 2014

It might be a little bit, but probably not as much as tambeshakunt infers. You might get 5% more performance with the top end processor, but I doubt you'd notice the difference.

wip99gt · Sep 19, 2014

With a decent overclock on that 3570k you should be just fine.

zqa20 · Sep 19, 2014

great as i don't plan to change my CPU till skylake

what overclock would you recommend?

wip99gt · Sep 19, 2014

The higher the better. I'm not sure where you'll start seeing diminishing returns because I haven't played with gtx980s. I know that with my 780s and my 4770k I saw improvements up to 4.2ghz in gaming. What resolution are you gaming at?

zqa20 · Sep 19, 2014

1440p at the moment. my 3570k is clocked@ 4.5.

But i plan on getting a 1080p 144hz G sync monitor when one comes out. which is why i want two 980s so i can take advantage of the high refresh rate almost all the time.

zqa20 · Sep 19, 2014

wip99gt :

Also to my knowledge (i could be wrong here) but my 3570k@4.2 is pretty much the same as your cpu @stock (for gaming)

have you seen any bottlenecks with your current SLI setup?

wip99gt · Sep 19, 2014

My graphics cards are my bottleneck. I do run triple 1440p monitors though and my 4770k is at 4.4ghz. Sli GTX980s will be overkill for a 1080p monitor at any refresh rate. If I was in your shoes I'd wait on the new monitor and see what comes out in the 4k resolution in the next while. Your getting a serious amount of gpu power and should get the proper screen to push those things. You could try tweaking your monitor right now. I was able to get my Asus ones up to 90hz.

zqa20 · Sep 19, 2014

would you say a single 980 is enough for 1080p 144hz? i am getting the 980 "free"

wip99gt · Sep 19, 2014

Probably. Those things look like they overclock incredibly well too. Try just the one first. It's easy to add another later on.

zqa20 · Sep 19, 2014

nikoli707 · Sep 19, 2014

wtf? there is no known bottlenecks with any sandy bridge or higher i5. not sure who would think so or what benchmark someone is looking at.

zqa20 · Sep 19, 2014

nikoli707 :

I thought the same before i posted here lol

dgingeri · Sep 19, 2014

nikoli707 :

yeah, there are. If you run an i5 with a pair of any of the higher end (GTX680 or higher) GPUs, it will not quite run as fast as a higher end processor. The difference isn't big, but it is there.

zqa20 · Sep 19, 2014

dgingeri :

so what type of scaling would you expect on average with my 3570k@4.5 with a pair of 980s

nikoli707 · Sep 19, 2014

show me a game that is known to be highly threaded that can give you a quantifiable boost in fps when going with a faster processor. not horribly coded watchdogs with ridiculous driver overhead. i can definitely see small but barely noticable difference if your not running max settings at a low resolution. but in a high end game with extreme gpu demand, there just isn't enough calls to the cpu for any amount of work. ivy 4c4t@4.5ghz compared to what?.... a 5960k@5.0ghz.... maybe 4% performance loss at best in the worst case 2 way sli/cfx 980/290x setup. some games/benchmarks actually run slightly slower on x99 than they do on z87/z97, though again this is a very small hit... something like 1%.

dgingeri · Sep 19, 2014

zqa20 :

It's really not going to be enough to worry about. Any cost of buying the next processor up would just be too much for the minor increase, but if you really want, you'll probably get between 5 and 7 percent higher speeds out of a 3770k, depending on the game. MMOs, like World of Warcraft and Star Trek Online see more than that because they're more CPU bound anyway.

I know for certain, from recent experience, that World of Warcraft sees better than 10% improvement between HT off and on with a 4790k and dual GTX 680s. (My own system, recent experimentation.) Star Trek online saw slightly less, but the difference was noticeable. Starcraft II saw slightly better than 10%. Diablo III saw no difference at all. I don't have any recent FPS games to test, though. My most recent first person shooter is Doom 3, and I haven't even bothered to install it since my last system rebuild. I'm just not into those.

It's not a review about these directly, but it does compare the new devil's canyon chips on a system with SLi, which should see about the same difference between them: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8227/devils-canyon-review-intel-core-i7-4790k-and-i5-4690k/5 There's a slight difference, and the higher end chips do see a little boost, but the difference really isn't much.

dgingeri · Sep 19, 2014

nikoli707 :

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8227/devils-canyon-review-intel-core-i7-4790k-and-i5-4690k/5

It's small, but it is there.

nikoli707 · Sep 19, 2014

dgingeri :

it definitely is. but also like you said, definitely not worth uprooting an already powerful lga1155 rig to go to lga1150 for a mere 2 or 5fps, especially if your at or over 60fps@60hz. if your on a 120/144hz refresh, 105fps or 110fps will never be noticeable with the actual in game per second fps jumping from around, a gsync monitor would be much more worth it at this point.

dgingeri · Sep 19, 2014

Well, with a pair of GTX 980s, it would be a bit more pronounced. I still wouldn't think it would be worth upgrading the CPU, though.

zqa20 · Sep 19, 2014

sigh, how much of a performance scaling loss do you think i'd see then with a 3570k@4.5?

I still don't fully understand how my 3570k could bottleneck that bad. From my understanding haswel is almost the same as ivy in terms of gaming. A 3570k@4.2 is just as fast as a 4770k so surely @4.5 I'm going to get the same experience as a haswel refresh right? I might be wrong but that's what i thought.

nikoli707 · Sep 19, 2014

dgingeri :

zqa20 :

i wouldn't worry about it, your 3570k@4.5 is very very fast by any standard.

zqa20 · Sep 19, 2014

(double post)

gtx 980 SLI bottleneck?

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