Is my cpu a bottleneck?

jerrykapa

Commendable
Jun 6, 2016
11
0
1,510
Hello! I got a MSI gtx 960 4gb and i seem to have poor performance while playing games. (overwatch runs with low and med textures at 60-70 fps while other systems run it on max with better fps) The only conclusion that i came to was that my CPU is bottlenecking my system.
Here are my specs
CPU (APU ,but using it as a CPU) : AMD Kaveri A8 3,3 GHz
GPU : MSI nVidia gtx 960 4gb
Ram : 8 gb dual channel
HDD : a really old 189 gb maxfactor
I want to know if the cpu is the problem and a suggestion on what i could swap it with if that's the case. ( side-note; i could have bought the fx 6300 instead, though i dont know if that would have been better anyway)
 

Hawkshot

Admirable
I think you're right and its your CPU that is holding you back getting better performance in games but I cannot justify buying a new CPU for an FM2+ motherboard they are not going to be worth your time nor money as they are just so old now, it maybe time to upgrade your motherboard/cpu ideally you wouldn't want anything less than the following.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i3-6100 3.7GHz Dual-Core Processor ($110.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Motherboard: ASRock H170A-X1 ATX LGA1151 Motherboard ($78.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Memory: Kingston HyperX Fury Black 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR4-2133 Memory ($39.89 @ OutletPC)
Total: $229.87
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-07-14 09:22 EDT-0400
 

sukhwinder2014

Reputable
Apr 10, 2014
44
0
4,540


Well, CPU may be the bottleneck here. You can test it yourself with monitoring tools like GPU-Z or MSI Afterburner.
I tested my CPU for bottlenecks when I got my R9 270X, with same programs.
Just download and install them on your PC. And let them run in background while you are gaming. After a gaming session check the various graphs for your CPU, GPU, RAM or HDD usage.

Mainly check the GPU graphs. If your GPU usage graph doesn't stay near 99 percent most of the time and shows dips to below 60-70 percent often, then your GPU is being bottle-necked. And if that's the case, then it can indeed be your CPU cuz it seems like the weak link here. Which motherboard are you using btw?

And I can tell from my personal experience that modern and even most of multiplayer games do need a good quad core CPU to run smoothly along with a good GPU.