Possible bottleneck. Help?

[Enthusiast]

Hey guys. I recently purchased a GTX 670 out my need to finally upgrade for max settings at 1080p. I have not yet overclocked it, although my particular non-reference card is stellar for doing so. I've tried to run a few games and my performance is almost exactly the same as it was with my 570. Sleeping Dogs with high AA runs like before - high 30's, low 40's. I'm seeing 680's get 114 FPS max, and I get ~60 max.


I'm running:
670 stock
i5-2500k @ 4.7
p8p67 (Not great, cost me about $170. Didn't want SLI, so I bought a non-SLI board.)
6GB RAM


That should be all the details you need.


So, any ideas?

 

[kevin83]

What is the clock speed on your RAM? You should be fine if yours is above 1600. Also make sure you are running the sticks in a proper dual-channel configuration, otherwise you're halving the available memory bandwidth.

Are you absolutely certain your cpu overclock is completely stable?

What power supply (exact model name/number) are you using?

 

[Deemo13]

How did you get 6GB of RAM?

 

[Enthusiast]

My power supply is a TX650W.

I have a 3x2GB combination of RAM.

I could lower my CPU overclock. It doesn't overheat, although my voltage is a little higher than normal. I put it on OCCT and it never crashed.

 

[kevin83]

There's your problem. Take a stick of ram out such that you have one stick in each channel (so one in slot 1 and one in slot 2 leaving 3 and 4 empty), and run the benchmark again. You probably have a memory bottleneck from not running in dual channel, which only works when the channels are populated with equal amounts of ram.

 

[wr6133]

Turn off V-sync if you are maxing out at 60

 

[Enthusiast]

Okay. If I only have 4GB, I think it's reasonable to upgrade the sticks.
Should I go 8 or 16GB?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233144&name=Desktop-Memory

or

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233280&name=Desktop-Memory

or would you recommend something else?


Edit: I looked it up on CPU-Z and I'm only getting 666.8mhz, and it displays as a single channel. So basically I bought the wrong RAM ages ago, and it didn't matter until now. So, what should I get?

 

[kevin83]

I would recommend g-skill, they also have great memory timings which combined with 1600mhz speeds reduce latency, which can be helpful in speeding up almost anything. Plus they have very competitive prices. Also you won't need more than 8gb ever unless you open like 40 tabs in firefox and play multiple video games and have office open and edit video all at the same time.
G. Skill 2x4gb 1600mhz 8-8-8-24
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231548&name=Desktop-Memory

When you get whatever ram installed boot into the bios and make sure you are running dual channel at 1600mhz, if not turn on xmp and select the right memory frequency.

 

[Enthusiast]

Perfect. Thanks.

 

[Enthusiast]

Best answer selected by Enthusiast.