E8400 bottlenecked severly by 5870... help?

[mb203]

Hi everyone, I just upgraded from an evga gtx 260 216 core to an asus 5870 v2 card and my overclocked core 2 duo isn't happy about it.

Before purchasing this card I made sure to read up on it, almost every forum post confirmed that an e8400 (especially mine, overclocked to 3.6ghz) would not bottleneck this card, but my performance in GTA4 is atrocious and the CPU usage rises to 90-100%. (idles at ~15-20)

I've completely removed all the nvidia drivers and updated the ati drivers to 8.703.0.0, but my games still stutter worse than michael jay fox. Performance in bad company 2 has degraded from my gtx 260 as well....

Any ideas? Thanks!

 

[calinkula]

What PSU do you have? Under load the 5870 will use more power than the gtx 260. Things could be scaling back because of the lack of power.

 

[daship]

GTA 4 really needs a quad, as far as GHz you got plenty, you just lack xtra cores.

 

[mb203]

my psu: corsair 550w, 41a on 12v

I know gta4 is very cpu intensive but my point is that I was getting better performance when using a gtx 260 with my dual core.

 

[Raidur]

You're using the same settings/resolution? Default catalyst control center options?

 

[mb203]

I'm running at 1920x1080, everything in ccc is default

 

[Bluescreendeath]

Before purchasing this card I made sure to read up on it, almost every forum post confirmed that an e8400 (especially mine, overclocked to 3.6ghz) would not bottleneck this card, but my performance in GTA4 is atrocious and the CPU usage rises to 90-100%. (idles at ~15-20)

1. GTA4 has bad fps unless you have a quad. Otherwise, turn down some of the view distance settings...

2. A stock E8400 is heavily bottlenecked by a 4870x2 at lower resolutions, and bottlenecked to a far lesser extent at higher resolutions(the 4870x2 has the same performance as your card, but requires slightly more cpu power due to its dual-configuration).

An OCed E8400 @ 3.6GHz would still be somewhat to moderately bottlenecked by a 4870x2 or 5870 at lower resolutions, and have a small bottleneck for GPU intensive games at higher resolutions.

Here are some benchmarks for FarCry2:

So you should be barely/slightly bottle-necked in most games, moderately bottlenecked in more CPU intensive games, and heavily bottle-necked in poorly-coded CPU-black hole games such as GTA4.

 

[jonpaul37]

agreed, for GTA4 alone, the best upgrade path would have been to get a Q9550 or another quad core... then get another GTX 260 for SLI or the 5870...

 

[popatim]

I find it hard to beleive a 5870 cannot beat a 260 using the same processor. Like the OP, I beleive something else is going on/wrong.

Are you using the ati drivers or the asus drivers? and have you tried the other

Here's Toms review showing a 5870 on par with a gtx295 in GTA4...
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-5870,2422-19.html

and I found another post on AMD forums saying if you get poor performance in gta4 to use the 10.3b catalyst drivers.

let us know how it goes.

 

[Raidur]

^ +1

Even though quad will perform much better, you should still be very playable.