Old CPU bottlenecking my GPU?

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chickenturkey

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Jan 25, 2015
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Hi there,
Last year I upgraded my old 9800gt to a gtx 750ti and I can play almost all latest AAA games on high settings 40-50 fps at 1400x900. I've an old q6600 clocked at 3GHz and 6gb ram. recently I installed rise of the tomb raider and I've been playing it at high preset. I'm monitoring my fps, gpu- and cpu usage and i'm getting 40fps most times. My CPU usage on all 4 cores is around 100% most of the time while my GPU usage lowers at some points to around 60% and then the framerate starts dipping to the low 20s. Is this lowering of the GPU usage because of a bottleneck with my old CPU? If yes, what CPU should i upgrade to while i'm on a budget? Should I go for an i5 or should i wait? I heard there are new AMD zen CPUs coming this year?

Thanks,

PS sorry if my english isn't good
 
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With the CPU usage around 100% while GPU usage drops significantly, yes, it would seem that you're experiencing a CPU bottleneck. With an old Q6600 at 3GHz, that isn't much of a surprise. Getting something like a newer i5, say the i5-4460, would be a huge CPU performance improvement. As SwizzleDude said, this would require a new motherboard as well. I should also note that you'd want new RAM. Even if you have an LGA 775 system with DDR3, it would be older high-voltage modules that aren't fully compatible with the newer DDR3 memory controllers. It would definitely not be good if you wanted a Skylake system since they use even lower voltage DDR3L.

You could wait and see for Zen, but that might still be several months to about a year...
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blazorthon

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Sep 24, 2010
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With the CPU usage around 100% while GPU usage drops significantly, yes, it would seem that you're experiencing a CPU bottleneck. With an old Q6600 at 3GHz, that isn't much of a surprise. Getting something like a newer i5, say the i5-4460, would be a huge CPU performance improvement. As SwizzleDude said, this would require a new motherboard as well. I should also note that you'd want new RAM. Even if you have an LGA 775 system with DDR3, it would be older high-voltage modules that aren't fully compatible with the newer DDR3 memory controllers. It would definitely not be good if you wanted a Skylake system since they use even lower voltage DDR3L.

You could wait and see for Zen, but that might still be several months to about a year away. We don't really know when they'll be out. Besides that, we don't know for sure how well they'll perform, so we don't know if they're worth the wait or not.
 
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chickenturkey

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Jan 25, 2015
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Thank you for your quick response,

If I upgrade my CPU I want it to be future proof so that I can upgrade my video card later when it's really necessary without creating a bottleneck. Let's say I can spend a little more and I would buy an i5 6600K. Would the 6600K keep up with games in the future and will it be able to handle newer video cards without creating bottleneck? Or should I go for an 8 core processor? I've read that upcoming games might utilize more than 4 cores.
 
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chickenturkey

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Jan 25, 2015
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Thank you also for your quick response,

Maybe you can help me on my next question;

Thank you for your quick response,

If I upgrade my CPU I want it to be future proof so that I can upgrade my video card later when it's really necessary without creating a bottleneck. Let's say I can spend a little more and I would buy an i5 6600K. Would the 6600K keep up with games in the future and will it be able to handle newer video cards without creating bottleneck? Or should I go for an 8 core processor? I've read that upcoming games might utilize more than 4 cores.

 
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