CPU Bottleneck Advice

mjmcdonagh1

Distinguished
Mar 19, 2013
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Hello,

So I'm more or less new to the PC Gaming thing. I've never been a huge gamer (PC, console, or otherwise) but recently been keen to dive in a little more. Assassins Creed on the PS3 or Skyrim, SWTOR, and occasisoally WOW on the PC have seen me through the last decade or so but I want to expand my horizons. I have a reasonably powerful (if outdated...) workstation which has never had a problem running Skyrim, SWTOR, or WOW, but over the weekend I attempted to run both Minecraft and GTA IV (OK, I'm a bit behind the times but these are new to me haha) and in both cases I was hitting 100% CPU almost immediately which is then giving very jumpy performance to a more or less unplayable extent. I've tried reducing graphics settings, particularly in GTA IV anything that specifically mentions an impact on the CPU(s), but I'm still not really getting anywhere... I'm really just wondering if this seems right, are these games really so CPU intensive? Or is there maybe a problem somewhere with either my hardware of software config? I've put my specs below:

2x Quad Core AMD Opteron 2360 @ 2.6GHz
16GB DDR2 ECC RAM (8x 2GB Sticks)
NVIDIA Quadro FX4800
(CPU's using a proprietry AIO Liquid Cooler for the case)
Running Windows 10 Pro (x64) on a 1TB HDD with 600GB Free (using another 3 HDD's for music, pictures, etc)

I know it's not the newest setup, and paricularly the Opterons aren't exactly optimised for gaming (or very fast) but I was surprised by how bad the performance was. Is it possible that the games aren't able to utilise both CPUs? Or is the setup really just too outdated to keep up ?

Thanks in advance! I've done a lot of custom builds over the years (never for myself because you know, budget...) but always for video editing, or sound production environments. I don't have much experience in the realm of gaming rigs so any advice would be very much appreciated.

Thanks,

Matt
 
Solution

More concerning is that the Quadro is a workstation GPU that doesn't really get gaming drivers.

Only recently has it been possible to do intense workstation stuff and gaming with one GPU, and it's because a lot of work programs now support CUDA, which is very advanced in the latest high end graphics cards.

What I'm saying is I don't feel it's practical to try to upgrade that system for gaming. If you're doing intense work station stuff that requires a lot of 3D modeling or such, and want to game on the same system, look into building a rig with a more modern CPU and GPU, but first research whether the work programs you use can...

More concerning is that the Quadro is a workstation GPU that doesn't really get gaming drivers.

Only recently has it been possible to do intense workstation stuff and gaming with one GPU, and it's because a lot of work programs now support CUDA, which is very advanced in the latest high end graphics cards.

What I'm saying is I don't feel it's practical to try to upgrade that system for gaming. If you're doing intense work station stuff that requires a lot of 3D modeling or such, and want to game on the same system, look into building a rig with a more modern CPU and GPU, but first research whether the work programs you use can work with CUDA.

That said, if you're only work based use is video editing, you don't at all need a workstation GPU for that. Any decent gaming GPU combined with a 6 or 8 core CPU will do that just fine. A fast quad core 8 thread CPU is also acceptable for editing, though not optimal. It's all a matter of what you can afford.

You didn't get specific about budget, but if you're used to building rigs for others, I assume you can at least get good part prices?
 
Solution