I'm not getting the true perfomance from my HD 5770

[LuigiVN]

Hi guys. I bought one of these 2 weeks ago:

Sapphire HD 5770 1GB GDDR5.

Here are my system specs:

Mobo ASRock G41m-S
Intel C2D E7500 @ 2.93 GHz
Sapphire HD 5770 1 GB GDDR5
Corsair XMS2 4GB DDR2 PC-6400
Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB SATAII
Antec TruePower Trio 550w SLI Ready
AOC 17'' 716Sw 1280 x 720
Windows 7 Ultimate Edition 64-bit

The thing is that today I played Need For Speed Undercover on it's maximum settings and frames per second are between 35 and 45, sometimes they drop to 20 but it's pretty rare. I thought that this card + my system could take this game. Is something wrong with my system? Is something bottlenecking? I removed nvidia drivers with driversweeper before installing catalyst 10.7, updated to 10.8 trying to fix the problem, didn't worked. I ran Unigine Heaven with these settings:

here are the results with the tesselation ON:

and here they are with teselation OFF:

.

Overclocking my CPU is not an option right away, I bought an artic silver 5 tube yesterday, I'm going to change the stock intel's paste with this one because my CPU reached 80 degrees C while pushing it with Intel Burn Test. My case's airflow is not good, I'm upgrading to a CM 690 in a week or so... Thanks guys.

 

[Maziar]

Hello
Well your are playing at a low resolution,therefore your CPU bottlenecks your VGAs,so they won't run at their full potential.
And about NFS undercover,well i don't think it benefits much from either SLI/CF,so try disabling CF and play again.

 

[skolpo]

Those Unigine benchmarks look pretty accurate to me. I'm not entirely sure about the NFS game, but I don't think you should expect a whole lot from an HD5770 paired with a C2D.

 

[deweycd]

Your benchmarks for NFS is accurate. NFS is a fickle game and as others are saying right now you are limited by the resolution you are playing at.

As for your case, the CM 690 is really nice and will provide you with excelent cooling, my CPU barely goes over 50C at max load.

 

[LuigiVN]

So...would overclocking be a solution for this? I was planning on buying an Artic Cooler Freezer 7 pro (a friend of mine pushed his E8500 to 4 GHz with that thing). and the new case.

 

[Maziar]

Yes OC'ng will help,but getting a new monitor is also good because you won't see the true potential of 2 5770s at low resolutions.

 

[Kari]

but then his framerates will drop even more if he gets higher rez monitor.....
if his cpu is holding him back at his current rez, there's no way in hell it would get faster at higher rez. Sure the gpu would work harder but the overall fps wouldn't increase at all.

here read this and think about it for a while
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/radeon-hd5870-cpu-scaling.html

 

[Kari]

Yes it should run games smoothly. But there might actually be something wrong with his system at the moment that's preventing the system from actually operating at peak efficiency. So buying a bigger screen isn't really the answer...

So his framerates would probably stay the same or LOWER, but the resolution and settings would be set higher and it would look a lot nicer.

fixed

used my amazing paint skills and made this little graph

 

[skolpo]

That's pretty true. If he's getting 35-45FPS with his current setup at 1280x720, his FPS will either be around 35-45FPS or LOWER at higher resolutions because the CPU bottleneck is still prevalent. It doesn't make sense to see the FPS go higher when the resolution goes up while the computer stays the same.
And TBH, I don't even think he's suffering a large CPU limitation. It's more of a GPU limitation or some sort of hardware issue that I see.

 

[LuigiVN]

Wow... I thought my PC was more than enough to play games like these... Obviously Metro 2033 or BFBC2 would be even worse... I need to try... I live in COsta Rica and Monitors aren't very cheap here so... =S... I'd like a 22' one but I don't have the money for it (Today, I just bought a CM 690 II case and 2 extra fans). I wasn't planning on doing this but Upgrading my CPU to so,ething like a Q9300 and then OC it would help? Because that's some kind of economic option for me. TY guys.

 

[LuigiVN]

Oh, guys, I'm not using CF. I don't know why you think so... Maybe you're reading my post too fast but no... G41 chipset does not support multiple video cards.

 

[skolpo]

OC'ing the CPU you have now is a better option.

 

[LuigiVN]

I thought this card would be an overkill at that resolution... turns out my CPU is heavily limitating it... Dammit... That's it right?

 

[nforce4max]

I thought the same thing about my two 9800gt that I hacked sli on my amd rig but nope I ended up moving to a gtx 460 and dumping them back into my intel box. Just nuke your cpu once you got your rig together in it's nice new case. 3.4-3.6 is to be expected which will do wonders for you. I got a e7200 at 3.6ghz and a 8250e tri core at 2.6ghz, both on stock mult.

 

[jsphdickens]

I would run PassMark the benchmark your system and then compare your scores to other systems with your cpu and video card. I agree with the general consensus that your CPU preventing you from taking advantage of your GPU. I would look into overclocking it if you do not want to upgrade.

 

[LuigiVN]

Thanks for the replies guys. For the overclocking, I'm moving my system to the CM 690 II tonight. I applied Artic Silver 5 to the CPU when it was inside my old-shitty case. (note that I'm using intel stock cooler). Without the new thermal material the CPU reached 79 degrees C with Int Burn Test (ambient temperature is normally between 22 and 27 degrees C at night, on a hot day it could reach 30 degrees C.).

 

[nforce4max]

Thanks for the replies guys. For the overclocking, I'm moving my system to the CM 690 II tonight. I applied Artic Silver 5 to the CPU when it was inside my old-shitty case. (note that I'm using intel stock cooler). Without the new thermal material the CPU reached 79 degrees C with Int Burn Test (ambient temperature is normally between 22 and 27 degrees C at night, on a hot day it could reach 30 degrees C.).

Ouch but some of us during summer have to live with on rare days up to 40c+ and it has been a hot year. I could have bought a gtx 480 for what I spent on my power bill.

 

[LuigiVN]

Well it isn't rare to see hot days like those here but we're in winter (some weird version of winter without snow and a lot of raining..more like a raining season)... In the summer temperatures in some places (like beaches) here reach 38 or 40 degrees C DAILY. I live in the central valley and here isn't as hot as some other places... Like Puntarenas or Guanacaste... Here's a Costa Rica map so you can see where...

The hottest places are Guanacaste, Puntarenas, Limón, Alajuela and Heredia. Cartago and San Jose (where I live) are cooler, in the highest mountains of san jose you can reach 3 or 4 degrees C (no matter if it's summer or winter)...

 

[nforce4max]

Well it isn't rare to see hot days like those here but we're in winter (some weird version of winter without snow and a lot of raining..more like a raining season)... In the summer temperatures in some places (like beaches) here reach 38 or 40 degrees C DAILY. I live in the central valley and here isn't as hot as some other places... Like Puntarenas or Guanacaste... Here's a Costa Rica map so you can see where...

http://www.1-costaricalink.com/costa_rica_images/costa_rica_provinces.gif

The hottest places are Guanacaste, Puntarenas, Limón, Alajuela and Heredia. Cartago and San Jose (where I live) are cooler, in the highest mountains of san jose you can reach 3 or 4 degrees C (no matter if it's summer or winter)...

At least you are better off than others in your country. One year it got hot enough to ware the glue that held up the rear view mirror melted back when mom had that old 1976 plymouth 4 door.

 

[LuigiVN]

Holy crap... we're getting kind of off-topic... Well... I'll overclock my CPU when I get a nice aftermarket cooler, I don't think mine + artic silver 5 will be enough to keep it cool, it barely keeps in nice (I haven't tested it with the artic silver 5 yet, I damaged my motherboard trying to get those push pins in...).