Amd athlon x3 440 bottleneck?

[corymartin66]

when i play skyrim on my system on high setting it lags when im in a city but my gpu% never goes past 50% (gtx 550 ti oc @1ghz) i have my game caped at 40fps so every where else in the game its always 39-40 fps

 

[popatim]

what resolution do you game at?

 

[clutchc]

The lowly GTX 550ti won't be bottlenecked by the Athlon II triple core. But the card itself is probably your weak spot. As asked above, what is your resolution?

 

[Deleted member 217926]

It's the CPU. Skyrim requires a relatively fast CPU at higher detail.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/skyrim-performance-benchmark,3074-9.html

 

[corymartin66]

720p

 

[protokiller]

The game uses two cores only and it takes a Phenom II @3.5GHz not to drop below 30fps on ultra.

I would not be too amazed if two cores on the Athlon II X3 without any l3 cache and possibly a lower ghz is having some trouble.

 

[clutchc]

At only 720p I'm surprised the 3.0GHZ Athlon II X3 is struggling. And most games make little to no use of the 'missing' L3 cache. In fact, now I'm even surprised the GTX 550ti is struggling at that rez. How and why are you capping the frame rate? And why at 40 fps?

Have you cleaned your system of crap that wastes Windows resources, and registry errors that cause slowdowns lately? If not, try CCleaner: http://www.piriform.com/CCLEANER Do the Clean and Registry both.

When you installed your GTX 550ti, did you remove the old driver first?

 

[corymartin66]

im capping my frame rate with evga precision and i cap it because i rather have constant 40 fps vs 40-60 because when it drops i can see some lag....but now i have no lag beacuse i overclocked my cpu to 3.6 and updated my game to version 1.5 and now i can play maxed out with 34-40 fps with no problem (every thing on ultra and aa maxed out )