Hello, I am a new member here. Some background of my PC: in 2011 I built a rig specifically for maxing out battlefield 3 when it released. I put some of the best hardware available into my build, and it certainly accomplished its goal. However, I built my PC near the end of 2011 and the newer generations of hardware were about to be released. My friend that helped me suggested that I get one of the new processors because he felt that my video cards (2x gtx 590) were being bottlenecked by my i7-2600k @4.4 ghz. I didn't see the need to upgrade then, as it performed as well as I wanted it to.
Fast forward to now: star wars battlefront is about to release, and I'm looking to do a somewhat cost effective upgrade.
Before I go further I'll list my specs for you:
I7-2600k @ 4.4ghz
Gigabyte Z68-A mobo
16 GB DDR3
2x gtx 590 in QUAD SLI
2x 60GB SSDs in RAID
1200 Watt PSU
So, back to what my friend said...he thought that I may see another 30-40 frames out of my rig if I upgraded to the newer lga 2011 processors. Now that the 6th gen of intel processors has been released, I have had the idea that I would upgrade to the i7-6700k and get a new mobo + ddr4 ram. I was under the impression that my powerful cards were indeed being bottlenecked by my CPU, but tonight I decided to find out for sure. I ran two framerate tests in Battlefield 4 (as both SWBF and BF4 use the Frostbite 3 engine). Now, I must say I was surprised about my pc's performance while running BF4 tonight as I haven't played it much recently - it's optimization has greatly improved since its release.
Onto the test:
The first test I ran, I put the game at the lowest settings possible on the new community operations map (this map has a good mix of foliage, terrain, objects, destruction, and water). All FOUR of my GPUs sat at around 65-75% usage during this test, the processor cores had a total usage of somewhere between 45-65%. The minimum FPS during the 5 minute test was 68 FPS, the maximum FPS was 201 FPS, and the average was 151 FPS.
The second test was the opposite of the first; I maxed out every single setting possible. Everything at ULTRA with HBAO and Highest post-processing. This is something my system would not have handled nearly as well when the game first released, as it was actually quite playable tonight. The results were: a minimum of 32 FPS, a maximum of 168 FPS, and an average of 94 FPS. Importantly - all FOUR GPUs sat at around 95% usage and the CPU once again sat at around 50-75%.
Now to me, these results don't say the CPU is bottlenecking my cards, in fact it screams the opposite. However, I wonder if my friend could have been talking more about the bottoming out in the framerates at times. I have seen plenty of topics pop up on google about SLI microstutter. Not sure if a more powerful CPU would help the bottoming out/micro stutter, or if they are related to an underpowered GPU or poor optimization respectively. Before a fair amount of optimization to BF4, I was noticing that in certain situations that I was actually running the game MUCH smoother after increasing the graphical settings as opposed to when I lowered them.
It may be worth mentioning that I like to go into nvidia inspector and play around with the settings individually for games that I play.
As a final note, I was able to play the SWBF beta fairly smoothly with a mix of medium and high settings. Beta usually means poor optimization, but not being able to play all of the maps makes me wonder if I will be able to run a map like endor as smoothly as a map like hoth.
TL;DR -- should i upgrade my i7-2600k to an i7-6700k or my 2x gtx 590s to a single gtx 980 ti??
Thank you so much for any help that anyone can give me, I know it's a long post.
Fast forward to now: star wars battlefront is about to release, and I'm looking to do a somewhat cost effective upgrade.
Before I go further I'll list my specs for you:
I7-2600k @ 4.4ghz
Gigabyte Z68-A mobo
16 GB DDR3
2x gtx 590 in QUAD SLI
2x 60GB SSDs in RAID
1200 Watt PSU
So, back to what my friend said...he thought that I may see another 30-40 frames out of my rig if I upgraded to the newer lga 2011 processors. Now that the 6th gen of intel processors has been released, I have had the idea that I would upgrade to the i7-6700k and get a new mobo + ddr4 ram. I was under the impression that my powerful cards were indeed being bottlenecked by my CPU, but tonight I decided to find out for sure. I ran two framerate tests in Battlefield 4 (as both SWBF and BF4 use the Frostbite 3 engine). Now, I must say I was surprised about my pc's performance while running BF4 tonight as I haven't played it much recently - it's optimization has greatly improved since its release.
Onto the test:
The first test I ran, I put the game at the lowest settings possible on the new community operations map (this map has a good mix of foliage, terrain, objects, destruction, and water). All FOUR of my GPUs sat at around 65-75% usage during this test, the processor cores had a total usage of somewhere between 45-65%. The minimum FPS during the 5 minute test was 68 FPS, the maximum FPS was 201 FPS, and the average was 151 FPS.
The second test was the opposite of the first; I maxed out every single setting possible. Everything at ULTRA with HBAO and Highest post-processing. This is something my system would not have handled nearly as well when the game first released, as it was actually quite playable tonight. The results were: a minimum of 32 FPS, a maximum of 168 FPS, and an average of 94 FPS. Importantly - all FOUR GPUs sat at around 95% usage and the CPU once again sat at around 50-75%.
Now to me, these results don't say the CPU is bottlenecking my cards, in fact it screams the opposite. However, I wonder if my friend could have been talking more about the bottoming out in the framerates at times. I have seen plenty of topics pop up on google about SLI microstutter. Not sure if a more powerful CPU would help the bottoming out/micro stutter, or if they are related to an underpowered GPU or poor optimization respectively. Before a fair amount of optimization to BF4, I was noticing that in certain situations that I was actually running the game MUCH smoother after increasing the graphical settings as opposed to when I lowered them.
It may be worth mentioning that I like to go into nvidia inspector and play around with the settings individually for games that I play.
As a final note, I was able to play the SWBF beta fairly smoothly with a mix of medium and high settings. Beta usually means poor optimization, but not being able to play all of the maps makes me wonder if I will be able to run a map like endor as smoothly as a map like hoth.
TL;DR -- should i upgrade my i7-2600k to an i7-6700k or my 2x gtx 590s to a single gtx 980 ti??
Thank you so much for any help that anyone can give me, I know it's a long post.
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