Did I build a bottlenecked system????

[mortonww]

Here are the specs:

ASUS P7P55 pro motherboard
Core i5 750 @ 2.66 GHz
Geforce 9800 GT
Samsung Spinpoint F3 500 GB
4 GB of G.Skill Ripjaw Series DDR3 1600 MHz 9-9-9-24 @ 1.5 volts

In Sins of a Solar Empire I'm dropping frames in some of the larger battles. When I exit the game, I see the CPU usage chart (I downloaded this gadget) has been at almost 100%

Is my i5 not powerful enough to handle this game??? Should I overclock it and how much improvement should I expect???

 

[dndhatcher]

By definition some component is always bottlenecking the rest your system.

Here is an article about overclocking the i5.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i5-750-efficiency,2500.html

In your case the graphics card is a bottleneck. A 9800 GT is at the low end of graphics cards at this point but the i5 is argueably the fastest gaming processor available.


The problem is the 9800 GT is still so far above that games requirements and the i5 is such a fast CPU that you should be blazingly fast on that game. I strongly suspect you have a software issue and not a hardware problem. Spyware, Antivirus, other background processes, driver problems. Those are what I would be looking for to solve the problem.

Do you have a commonly benchmarked game you can run (like a free demo of Crysis or WoW or COD) to compare against?

Another good idea would be to read and maybe post on that games forums for help.

 

[mortonww]

Okay, will try and determine if there's a software issue. I built this for my cousin and he says that he's having framerate issues in some of his larger battles. I was shocked because, like you said, this GPU should be strong enough to handle the game and the processor I thought was up to the task.

When I got my 4870x2, I remember the card would throttle down when playing in windowed mode. Is there a similar thing that happens with the 9800 GT? Will also post on game forum. Thanks a lot, dnd.