Will an AMD FX-8320 bottleneck 2x GTX 980 cards?

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Ro-Tang Clan

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Currently I have an AMD FX-8320 comfortably overclocked to 4.7GHz and paired with a single MSI GTX 770 Lightning card. This works well and I'm able to crank the graphical settings up to "ultra" but I'm not able to turn anti-aliasing on without significant framerate drops. It becomes laggy and unresponsive. As a person who wants the best, I want to upgrade.

I've been looking at the Asus GTX 980 STRIX card and I'm considering buying two of them. However I'm concerned I will not see the full gain from them if the CPU is the bottleneck. Can anyone advise please?
 
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well like for me it was rebuy the past with another AM3+ and be out dated or go with a weak not realy what I want AMD APU type chip or go intel and have something more up to date in a board a faster chip at 80w or so over the lack luster amd offering of 125w + ??

pretty much a no brainer for me for what I wanted ....

now after running intel for a year I must admit it would be hard to return back to amd unless they pull a rabbit out of there hat in some way .... but that's just me ..


I might just wait until the next revision of Maxwell is released to upgrade to better cards ...

ya these first ones don't seem so good in the 970 line and I do see better cards in a month or so '' new and improved'' as they say , so I'm also...
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nikoK

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I see that you have overclocked it very much, which makes me think that you won't get bottlenecked, but don't expect super frame rates.
The only time you should see bottleneck is when you turn off v-sync and won't get over 100 fps in battlefield 3, an Intel I5 will give you at least 130 fps.
 
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Ro-Tang Clan

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Ahh okay, apologies for not replying to my own thread, an e-mail notification wasn't sent. Many thanks to the replies though and I can vaguely remember seeing an overclocked FX-8350 to 5GHz was only slightly behind an overclocked i5 4770k and while I have the 8320, they're pretty much the same CPU.

My reasoning for an SLI GTX 980 setup was more towards gearing up ready for 4k @ 60fps more than anything. I don't have a crazy multimonitor setup, just a single 50inch 1080P plasma TV and I had plans to go for a 4K TV. However, that's changed now and I'm no longer after a 4K TV due to expenditure elsewhere. Because my current setup only consists of a 60Hz 1080P TV, I'm gaming with V-sync on.

Still wanting to address the issue I first listed, I've managed to find a few GTX 770 Lightning cards around on ebay so I'm thinking of going 3-way SLI to tie me over until my budget can afford the whole 4K package. It's going to be a very expensive upgrade for me as I'd have to buy SLI GTX 980's, a decent 4K TV and because my PC is tied into my AV setup, I'd have to upgrade my AV receiver to one which has HDMI 2.0 sockets.
 
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nikoK

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If you ate going to play 4k then get 980sli or 970sli and overclock your cpu to 4.8-5.0ghz but then not more except you have a very good cooler, psu and motherboard.
If you will play at 1080p get the 770sli and no cpu overclocking
 
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Ro-Tang Clan

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I do have a decent power supply and motherboard and one of the best air coolers, but unless I convert to a custom loop water cooler I'm unable to overclock to 5GHz and I've proved this in another thread I raised here: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-2317929/5ghz-amd-8320.html

To be honest though, I don't see what difference it will make to squeeze out an extra 300Mhz. Obviously using a 60Hz TV I have V-sync applied so my goal here isn't to achieve ridiculously high fps as I will be capped to 60. I'm trying to make games as beautiful as possible without framerates dipping below 60. So this means every setting on "ultra" as well as the AA settings on maximum too to reduce jaggies. Currently with a single GTX 770 card I can set everything to "ultra" in games, the only thing that I can't do is apply any anti-aliasing filters as this takes a massive performance hit even going to 2zMSAA on some games.
 
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Ro-Tang Clan

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Ooo nice find! I especially like the fact that both CPU's are at stock clocks and aren't ridiculously overclocked to a point that's unattainable to the average consumer. Well it's proven that yes there are differences in gaming performance between i7's and FX 8 core's but the difference isn't at all as dramatic as people make it out to be.

It's also made me realise I'm not too sure 2-way SLI for GTX 980's at 4k is going to be adequate. I mean, even at 1440p they were getting around 90fps average for most games on both Intel and AMD. At 4k it's going to be dipping to 60fps at the same settings.

The TV I was going to purchase is this one: http://www.whathifi.com/samsung/ue55hu7500/review

It advertises itself as being capable of outputting 1000Hz but not too sure that's just a marketing ploy. I mean, after all my TV was advertised as being 600Hz with "sub-field" technology. But that's not true 600Hz, it just multiplies each frame in a 60Hz image by 10 to give the illusion of better motion processing and smoother playback. With 1000Hz to play with (if true) I'd wanna get atleast 140Hz 4k gaming performance. Might be holding off of 4K for awhile if that's the case.
 
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nikoK

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Next time playing try to check how many percent the cpu uses if it is at 97% or over is it bottlenecking the gpu if it isn't over 80% you can easily upgrate your gpu and get over 60 fps on ultra and 8*msaa
 
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TheConsiderateIlliterate

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Benchmarks can be deceptive. Now if you're playing single player games then you should be getting 60 fps on ultra but once you take the 8320 to the multiplayer realm, it's a different story. Multiplayer is much more taxing on the CPU.

For example, you won't be getting constant 60 FPS in heavily multiplayer games such as Planetside 2.

It's too bad there is no good way to perform accurate multiplayer benchmarks.
 
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Ro-Tang Clan

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Yeah you raise a good point, although not applicable to me as I don't competitively game in multiplayer games. Just a couple indie games and Borderlands 2 are the only titles I play with multiple people on. Although I do see where you're coming from and how it would affect others who do.



Many thanks for the link and it is as I predicted, 2-way SLI GTX 980's are hovering around 60fps and sometimes dipping below and pitching above that too. Shucks, well I think i'm going to wait a couple years till 4k @ 140Hz+ is a more affordable solution.

However, what I didn't predict is the FX-8350 at STOCK clocks is keeping up with that monster of a 12 threaded Intel CPU and less than half the price. That's incredible. It's looking like the higher the resolution the more GPU dependent it will become so the CPU doesn't matter as much. It's nice to know I don't have to rid myself of this AMD rig and build an Intel one at twice the cost to get to 4k.
 
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Ro-Tang Clan

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Oh man, I don't think I've ran Firestrike since I was benching my Phenom II X4 965BE with a GTX660 card. I'll have to bench my rig and test against that score, but cheers for the links you've provided. As I mentioned earlier though, the only reason I was going specifically for SLI GTX 980 was to futureproof for a 4k setup. I don't have the budget for it anymore, but even if I did, looking at the benchmarks it doesn't look like now is the time for it anyway.

For the current performance gain I want (max out everything including AA) I'm better off SLI'ing my current card, a GTX 770 Lightning. Since the Lightning is now a rare card and out of production, I couldn't find any to purchase which is why I was going for a GTX 980 as an upgrade. But then it got me thinking I could get two for 4k. So that's the reasoning behind it all.

Now that the new GTX 900 series are quite popular, a few 770 Lightning cards have become available on ebay as people have most likely ditched them in favour for the 980 cards making SLI 770 a viable option again. The performance of SLI 770 is about on par with a single 980 card, but the difference lies in price. The STRIX card is £500 and ebay lightning card is £160. It's a no brainer right now, especially now establishing SLI 980 doesn't deliver 4k at a average framerate much above 60fps. I've lost interest in them now.

 
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junkeymonkey

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its not like the chip will suffer due to graphics but it still comes down to how well your chip processes the info

you take something like super pi my 8350 will do a calculation lets say 18 sec. my intel 4670 will do it in 9 sec. my 6100 will do it in 23 sec.

a lot can go on and can vary from system to system and todays vid cards are pretty well made to do just about all the work in them selves I got some programs the the gpu is at 98% and the cpu if flat lined and some the pound them both or uses the cpu more then the gpu

so it comes down to a well balanced rig for your needs
 
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yangsx

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Most games only require single thread performance on CPU, FX8320's single thread performance is only 1403 in passmark, even the G3258 performs 50% better than FX8320 in single thread.
AMD is hopeless.
 
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junkeymonkey

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I all ways built amd but for me its a dead end seeing I done upgraded all I could in the am3+ platform with out going to that 220w blast heater

but I never seen where the 6100 or the 8350 really hurt me as far as what you asked and I don't see them cards and that chip you got being a big issue ..
more then likely it will end up a non issue overall

it may fall short here and excel there just like they all do the only thing is you got to buy and try to see for your self and 100 folks can say its great and you may find it sucks for you or vice versa and what works on this system may not as well on another
 
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Ro-Tang Clan

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You're right each system is different and each person builds their rig for different purposes too. I don't dispute the fact that Intel are faster than AMD, cause they are. Intel wins hands down. But I've always chosen AMD because I've only ever been gaming orientated and wanted the 'bang for buck' which AMD can deliver in terms of gaming. I don't video edit or do any CAD work so there's not point paying twice or sometimes 3 times and over the price for an Intel chip when I'm not going to truly take advantage of what it has to offer.

Slightly going off on a tangent, the fact that each person's rig is different is why I don't believe so much in the 'silicone lottery' myth. It's a fact that each CPU chip will perform differently, but I think the difference isn't as big as people make out to be. I think most of the time it's down to the hardware surrounding the CPU that makes the biggest difference.

In the end I did end up going for SLI GTX 770's as I managed to grab another MSI GTX770 lightning card from ebay for £170 including P+P. Although great for the games that have been released over the past 2/3 years It's certainly not future proof and it's starting to show with newer games. For example, playing Shadow Of Morder I have hit a VRAM bottleneck when turning the texture quality to "high" (http://imgur.com/a/FhTei). I think it's kind of silly that MSI's flagship 770 card has only 2GB of VRAM, while gaming series 770's can come in a 4GB variant.

I might just wait until the next revision of Maxwell is released to upgrade to better cards
 
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