Phenom 9600 vs. Phenom 2 940 - CPU Bottleneck?

[mike3zx]

Hello, I recently sold my 2 4870's and purchased 2 nVidida 275's to run in SLI. I have a 650w Antec PSU and a 9600 Phenom. I am running 4GB (2GBx2) DDR2-800 5-5-5-12 timings.

I am noticing very small if any improvement in performance over my 4870's (which wouldn't run in crossfire half the time) and from what I've been reading, my new GPU's should easily get better frames than the 4870's. My question is, what on my system do you think is a potential bottleneck? I plan to upgrade the CPU and figure that could be an issue, but do you think the PSU/RAM could be the issue?

I play on my 47" HDTV @ 1920x1080 w/ max AA/AF in all games over DVI>HDMI adaptor.

Thanks guys.

 

[mike3zx]

I also just changed my mobo from the Gigabyte MA790GP-UD4H to the ASUS M3N72-D so I could run SLI instead of CrossFire.

 

[yomamafor1]

I'm pretty sure the bottleneck is your CPU. Phenom 9600 is not really known for its...performance

One of the way to confirm this theory is to overclock your CPU and run benchmarks. You can run 3DMark06 (without the CPU test portion of course), and see if the scores do improve noticeably once the CPU is overclocked.

 

[mike3zx]

I will see if it will overclock again, but on my last mobo (Gigabyte one) it wouldn't overclock even 100MHz w/o crashing so I will try that and see how it goes. I think I am still going to get the 940, 700MHz + 4MB extra of L3 Cache has got to do something for my gaming.

 

[yomamafor1]

Keep in mind that most games on the market do NOT take advantage of quad core processors. So in reality your gain can be limited. However judging from the fact that your multi-GPU setup is bottlenecked by you Phenom 9600, a change of CPU can indeed improve the graphical performance.

 

[mike3zx]

Keep in mind that most games on the market do NOT take advantage of quad core processors. So in reality your gain can be limited. However judging from the fact that your multi-GPU setup is bottlenecked by you Phenom 9600, a change of CPU can indeed improve the graphical performance.

Yeah I'm not expecting an increase just because it's Quad-Core, I do video converting to use TV shows on my PS3 so the extra cores are for that, I just want the higher clock speeds and more cache which I figure is a great thing for the games. Do you think my PSU is too low power?