Phenom x6 1600t 4.02ghz Causing Stutter In Games; Need New CPU

Oh, just to add I hit the voltage wall at 1.475vcore, which I'm currently running at... I guess I could always add a better cooler but I don't know if I'd get a good performance increase since the voltage needed was going up exponentially at this point.

Thanks again for reading this!

The stutter in your games is not being caused by your 1600t which @ 4ghz will run any game happily and with high end cards, im afraid what your experiencing is the dreaded dual card micro stutter which occurs all to often with SLI and Crossfire. Its the reason i dont do dual cards anymore i just buy a better single card.

Here read this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_stuttering
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-geforce-stut...

Hmm I've heard about that but I'm not completely convinced... I get around 80% CPU usage in both games and I'm guessing they probably don't use all 6 cores  

You can see the usage of every single core in task manager. There are only a few games that use more than two cores. So I guess uther39 is right

I'm reading and seeing that the FX line probably won't help me all that much, and that I might really benefit switching to an Intel build as much as I would from a GPU upgrade (considering selling both cards for a gtx 680/hd 7970) but, switching to Intel would be a huge pain in the rear...

I find it hard to believe you would be CPU limited to that extent.

The best option for you by far is defo to keep your AMD build/Piledriver is on its way, and sell both 6870s, and personally id buy a gtx680 but a 7970 would be good too, try it i reckon like i did you will see a hell of a difference.

Alrighty, I'll give that a shot a see how it goes. If I remember to, I'll let you guys know!

Well I just tested Dirt Showdown with one card off and I'm only getting roughly 70% gpu usage and 50% cpu usage and still stuttering... Now I'm starting to believe that my raid 0 config is the issue because it's really low on disc space. Think a defrag will help?

Defrag doesn't work well, if you are low on disc space already. Unload some bigger files before you start it.

What game? What settings? What resolution?

Because if you've got 1GB Radeon HD 6870s then you've only got a 1GB framebuffer. Once you begin to spill over your framebuffer and into your system ram... you will start to experience stuttering and slowdowns.

Just a possible explanation. Could also be Micro-stuttering as others have mentioned above.

I did the defrag and space clean up and it actually made Dirt Showdown playable with one card, but it still stutters with two. Didn't test Sleeping Dogs with one though.

Thanks for inquiring, the cards are 2gb, and I play at 1360x768 at the highest settings possible with 8x analysing if I can maintain at least 40fps.

I'm trying to sell my cards to upgrade to a single with the same power or greater.

If anyone's interested here's one on Ebay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/271045186912?ssPageName=STRK:ME...

Just ordered the Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 3GB OC. It looks like an awesome overclocker, can't wait! I'll keep you guys posted.

Also, I still have another Radeon HD 6870 2GB to sell, if you're interested let me know.

the 7950 should clear up your problems

Just got the card and overclocked it. The overclock was disappointing with 1025/1375 at 1.3mv... And my problem still exists even with GPU usage not reaching higher than 80% spikes, with both games I still can't even keep a steady fps, even with 1080p in dirt showdown.

Ugh... I can't believe AMD's close to best offering cpu can't even power it's best gpus, so lame. I guess I'll wait for piledriver because I'm not looking forward to a mobo swap and a os reinstall.

What makes it worse is that they're both gaming evolved titles..  

Was able to lower the voltage to 1.175mv and the OC is still stable!  

Yeah don't get an FX CPU. They suck. your phenom is better.

sounds like a driver problem. Uninstall all drivers and do a clean reinstall.

Best answer selected by cheap_gamer4life.

I was going to suggest that, if you have ram to spare, to make a ramdisk and install your game to that and try running it from there. This will tell you if its the disk subsystem or not. Just remember that once you turn the pc off - you loose the stuff in the ramdisk so uninstall it first to avoid screwing up registry settings.

I highly doubt that his problems in Dirt 3 are because of disk reads. It isn't like an MMO that loads as you go, it is more like the EQ style MMOs where you have "zoning". To go to a new race requires going through a loading screen during which time the entire contents of the new track are loaded into RAM. You could drive up and down the whole track until time ran out and not have to load anything new.

A slow hard drive would make that zoning time take longer, but I don't see it causing mid race slow downs unless his RAM just isn't enough to hold the entire contents of a track forcing the utilizing of the page file (unlikely).

As far as in-race performance goes, it should be the same between a RAMdisk install and a regular hard drive install (or SSD install for that matter).

I wouldn't say this is worth testing, but I wouldn't fault him for testing it anyway.

Thanks guys, but I have 12gb of ram which wouldn't be enough because the game is 10gb.

also, have u tried running without the unlock and overclock? -revert the cpu back to stock and see if the problem is still there.

Don't mean to be rude, but how could that be an issue if I don't experience instability?