Is my 4890 being bottlenecked?

mbbs20

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yes it is bottlenecked...at stock 2.4 ghz.....most games still donot use more then 2 cores efficiently and rely mostly on speed vs number of cores...u can however pretty safely overclock that particular processor to around 3.0 - 3.2 ghz and even 3.6 depending on your other system specs.... at those speeds it will be a much better match to a fast card like the 4890..u can even run a benchmark like 3dmark 06 before and after the overclock to see if its worth it
 

paperfox

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I would somewhat dissagree and say that your q66 is somewhat bottlenecking your 4890. Take a look at the charts in the building a balanced gaming pc article:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/build-balanced-platform,review-31726-8.html

About half of the games in there are able to take advantage of 4 cores and the other half do not. those games that only support up to 2 cores saw a major boost from 2.8ghz to 3.0ghz. If you are able to overclock your q66 and unlock some extra performacne, if not then you wont miss that much, it also depends on which games you play aswell.
 

mbbs20

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in that case am not sure why you had the need to upgrade from a 8800 gts in the first place..unless u play on 2560 resolution on a 30 inch monitor, even then WoW is so easy on graphics card i think the 8800 gts would still have suffice

edit. i see you have a 22 inch monitor, honestly I would'nt have upgraded to a 4890 for Wow on that resolution
 

ragingazn628

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Well right now to be honest I still get a decent amount of spike lag in WoW. Especially when I raid or enter a populated city like Dalaran. I am currently getting 30-50 FPS in places like Dalaran (Highly populated place).
 

mbbs20

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actually i would like to correct you...bottlenecking is when the GPU is waiting or starved for more data to be processed but the CPU cannot keep up because its slow and cannot feed the data any faster to the GPU...so if the CPU has more arms (cores) then obviously it can keep up with the demand more easily....but unfortunately a lot of apps and games do not efficiently utilize the extra cores (more then two ) on a CPU, but the condition is changing pretty fast and newer softwares and games are multi core supportive.
 

mbbs20

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I agree with paperfox about the internet connection, that could be a reason ..... but like i said before WoW is more dependent on core speed as compared to the number of cores on a cpu..