Is my cpu okay for these video cards?

[betito477]

I have a AMD Athlon II X4 640 3.0GHz CPU OC'd to 3.4Ghz.

I currently have a single Radeon HD 6870 and am looking to upgrade to a GeForce GTX 570.

Wondering if my cpu is possibly bottlenecking my current card or will bottleneck a Geforce GTX 570?

 

[assassin123]

nope absolutely not

 

[AbdullahG]

I have a similar CPU (X4 630 @ 2.8GHz). I used a Radeon HD 6970 which has the same performance as your GTX 570. It will somewhat bottleneck your CPU, but not to such a great extent. Your games will stay max out with playable frames.

 

[mouse24]

no, your cpu is fine, i have an amd x3 and even that wont bottleneck one of those cards

 

[assassin123]

belive me nothing will happen

 

[corroded]

can I have the AMD card?

 

[Azt3ck]

To be honest it is a bottleneck. I had a AMD phenom II 920 w/ a GTX 275 card. Playing Black Ops I would get frame rate from 125fps but would drop down to 46fps which i did not like. So I upgraded and got me a 6950 2GB card. FPS was still at 125fps but would drop down to 70ish fps. Which this still bugged me even after a clean install of windows 7. So I eventually upgraded to a I7 2600K, I kept the 6950 2GB card and wow big difference. I now get 400FPS and sometimes hit 118FPS but mainly stable at 180fps. This is running at 1920x1080. When I do Eyefinity i get 125 FPS stable at 5760x1080. So I do know that your CPU would bottleneck.

 

[Azt3ck]

If you want to test to see if your CPU will bottleneck do this:

a) Run your game, but lower your resolution and eye candy.
If your FPS increases, it indicates that your cpu is strong enough to drive a better graphics configuration.

b) Limit your cpu, either by reducing the OC, or, in windows power management, limit the maximum cpu% to something like 70%.
If your FPS drops significantly, it is an indicator that your cpu is the limiting factor, and a cpu upgrade is in order.

 

[iam2thecrowe]

you should look at getting a new cpu, a 6870 should be able to play anything at 1080p. Maybe you should state what you are trying to achieve, are there any particular games not running well? what res do you play at? what PSU do you have?

 

[cwolf78]

The easiest thing to do is run MSI Afterburner from http://event.msi.com/vga/afterburner/download.htm

After you install it, you can use the OSD to display the framerate, video memory utilization, and GPU utilization while running a game that you would normally play at the settings and resolution you would like to ideally run it at. If your framerate is not where you'd like it to be and the GPU utilization is at 99-100%, then you could definitely benefit from a faster graphics card.

You can repeat this process when you are up and running on your new graphics card and see if the CPU is bottle-necking it. Just do the same thing but also have the Windows Task Manager running in the background so that way it tracks your CPU utilization.

For example, I have a AMD Phenom II X4 at 3.534 GHz and a GTX 560 Ti OC to 985/1970/2155 and running any modern game at Ultra settings at 1680x1050 (my monitor's native res) does not fullly max out the CPU on any one core except for Crysis 2. That game with the DX11 patch, Ultra Settings, and Hi-Res Textures will max out one core with the rest at about 85%. But still very playable framerates for sure. In 99% of games however, the CPU is almost never even close to maxxed out. In my case I upgraded from a 9800 GT to this card (with same CPU) and it was well worth it.

 

[Azt3ck]

The easiest thing to do is run MSI Afterburner from http://event.msi.com/vga/afterburner/download.htm

After you install it, you can use the OSD to display the framerate, video memory utilization, and GPU utilization while running a game that you would normally play at the settings and resolution you would like to ideally run it at. If your framerate is not where you'd like it to be and the GPU utilization is at 99-100%, then you could definitely benefit from a faster graphics card.

You can repeat this process when you are up and running on your new graphics card and see if the CPU is bottle-necking it. Just do the same thing but also have the Windows Task Manager running in the background so that way it tracks your CPU utilization.

For example, I have a AMD Phenom II X4 at 3.534 GHz and a GTX 560 Ti OC to 985/1970/2155 and running any game at Ultra settings at 1680x1050 (my monitor's native res) does not fullly max out the CPU on any one core on any modern game except for Crysis 2. That game with the DX11 patch, Ultra Settings, and Hi-Res Textures will max out one core with the rest at about 85%. But still very playable framerates for sure. In my case I upgraded from a 9800 GT to this card (with same CPU) and the upgrade was well worth it.

My Phenom II 920 did nt max out on task manager, it got 80% but like I said when I upgraded to the 2600K BIG difference in performance and i still used the same video card.
Now playing Black Ops i use 24% of my CPU usage. I have 3 screens so Im always watching temps and CPU/GPU usage.