Bottlenecking and/or Overheating? Underwhelmed Upgrading from 4870 to GTX 670

[Aldyrin]

Well, I waited forever for this upgrade, and from all the reviews I read, the GTX 670 should be able to max out with all setting set to highest in WOW at 1920x1080. However, when I tried this and flew around in Stormwind, I saw framerates drop down in the 15 fps range...

I'm using the 2GB Gigabyte OC version of the card.

E8400 @ 3.6 Ghz
P5Q Pro
Can't remember memory off the top of my head. I believe it is running at 961 Mhz.
128 m4 SSD @ SATA2 rates
silverstone fortress ft02

This was at stock speeds. I played around with bumping up the clock and memory speeds a bit, but then noticed furmark caused temps to rise to 96 C, so I shut that down quickly. Dropping back to stock speeds, the temp still rose to 89 C and might have kept rising if I let it. The fan got quite loud at these temps. Only ran for a minute or so to reach these temps, then I cancelled the tests.

So I really have two questions:
Is my WoW performance to be expected considering my other components? I was really expecting this card to be able to knock WoW out of the park.

Is my GTX 670 experiencing normal temps in this environment? They seem pretty high considering what other reviews have been seeing. Running the Heaven bench in a loop, temps topped off at about 71 C.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[TheBigTroll]

i can tell you right now its a massive bottleneck fro that e8400 and the memory. 71 degrees is normal for 670. you need to upgrade to at least a i5 3570k

 

[bystander]

A couple comments.

Your CPU will be a bottleneck when going around busy towns and in 25 man raids. This goes for any system. Your GPU is not the reason for the lower FPS. In other games, or in other areas, you'll find the GPU may not be bottlenecked.

Furmark is considred a heat virus by Nvidia and AMD. As long as other games are not causing it to go up much beyond 80C, you are fine. If you are seeing close to 90C, I'd guess you have some cable management to work on.

 

[Aldyrin]

It is pretty clean in there, not perfect, though. I'll post a picture tonight when I'm home.

 

[djscribbles]

Upgrading your processor, as others said will probably alleviate some of the framerate issues, however you will always be susceptible to dips in MMOs when you get into crowds; it's just something you should expect to see to some degree.

If your stuttering in raids (and that bothers you) go for a CPU upgrade, but if it's just cities don't worry about it too much

Edit: It's also worth noting that the 'fly over' is probably causing a lot of data to be loaded from your HDD (everyones clothes,textures,etc) for each person you see, and you may see smoothness if you move around within the same general area.

 

[bystander]

I forgot one more piece of advice. Turn down the shadow levels at least one or 2 notches below ultra. The shadowing is done by the CPU, and pretty much no one plays with it maxed. Even when people say they play at ultra, they are usually fudging it, and failing to mention that shadows are turned down.

 

[marshal11]

i can tell you right now its a massive bottleneck fro that e8400 and the memory. 71 degrees is normal for 670. you need to upgrade to at least a i5 3570k

he wont need a 3570k. a SB core i3 would do fine, he really only needs 2 cores, but since it has hyperthreading he is beyond safe with a i3 2100?