FX 8350 Possible Bottleneck?

That cpu was a bottleneck 2 years ago. Ya sure its good enough and gets people by but the problem is fanboys who told you that a fx8350 and a gtx980 would be a fine match. I honestly would never put anything higher than a 280x in that machine. Sure, some games you wouldn't have much of a bottleneck but most games of the past few years likely will. I used to own a 8320 at 4.8ghz paired with a hd7970 and most games used around 60% of the gpu because it was bottlenecking the card. As in it was only getting 60% of the potential performance.

You dont need an intel extreme cpu, you dont even need an overclockable K edition cpu but that would be a better combo. However, an FX cpu is by no means competitive with todays intel chips. Even a ivybridge 3570k would be a better choice. Although Nvidia drivers take more advantage of multiple cores and lower the potential bottleneck, that's still going to be an issue.

Truthfully, I get angry about this kind of thing. Someone along the way told you that this was a good combo. Someone blinded by fanboy syndrome had you throw money away. You probably get the performance of a gtx 970-gtx960 depending on the game. I think that's why many get frustrated about fanboys. I'm truly sorry you spent that much money on a card you get 2/3rds the performance out of. I feel your pain as I work 40-60 hr's a week and this has happened to me as well.


If you cant afford to get another motherboard and cpu then my only recommendation is to overclock the hell out of that cpu. Assuming you don't use stock cooling and the psu can take it. That should help somewhat but with these modern games its really a hit or miss, usually miss. Perhaps later on this year, it wont be as much of an issue. If you can hold out for dx12 to become mainstream you might be very happy to find out that those pesky cpu bottlenecks are gone. The problem is not many games support it now and trying to predict the future is risky to say the least.

To answer your question finally...

1) No its not a bad cpu, just like a ford taurus isnt a bad car. It does a job and it does it well but its not a Jaguar.

2) Yes its a cpu bottleneck, you are basically running an 18 wheeler truck on a 4 cylinder engine. yes it will get there, eventually but its in no way ideal. You can check the bottleneck live while you play games by downloading a tool called GPU-Z and enabling "continue refreshing the screen while gpu-z is in background". This will tell you everything about the gpu and how much work its doing.

3) I'm sure the gpu is fine.

4) dx12 may help you tremendously in regards to the bottleneck.