Someone help me find out what the problem is please?

[Phil Green]

Hi there all,

I've been lurking somewhat in the shadows watching all the posts about CPU's and GPU's etc, and based on feedback I chose to upgrade my rig; must admit, I'm somewhat dissapointed with the performance of it, considering the amount of money I have now spent over the years upgrading every three months.

Basically, this is the current system I have right now

CPU - AMD FX-8350 4.0Ghz Clocked at Factory
GPU - Saphire HD 7970 3GB (The triple cooler one, forgot the damn name)
Motherboard - M5A99X Rev 2.0 Evo
RAM - G.Skill RipJawZ 16GB (4x4) DDR3 clocked at 1866
HDD - OCZ 128GB SSD
Cooling for CPU - Corsair H60 Cooler
Secondary HDD - Seagate Barracuda 500GB 3.5 Sata Drive
PSU - 650W OCZ Perf

I've spent a ton of money upgrading, and I'm not getting the desired performance on most of the games I play, heck - I play Planetside 2 quiet regular, and since a few updates ago, I've noticed the game is slow as hell, and hardly hits' 40FPS in Warpgate (ON LOW SETTINGS!!!) Whereas Battlefield 3 will happily hit 80FPS on High in most maps,

Any recommendations? As I'm getting tired of having to go through .INI files to look up options to turn on and off, why don't developers simply base fixes for people on Nvidia, and other fixes for people on AMD as opposed to an all rounder where they bump into one another and cause issues for the latter.

Only reason I chose the FX8350 was because it LOOKED promising, but it's performance ingame is somewhat lacking in... Enthusiasm. Don't get me wrong, it's a nice processor, but I had heard a LOT of people saying it was the counterpart to the Intel I7, so to test the ultimate "bs" that was thrown at me, I tried it - and suffice to say as an AMD fan of many many years, when I upgrade again in a few months, I will be throwing away AMD and never looking back.

When people say to me, AMD is the best, and Intel is too expensive... There is a reason why there is a huge £100 price difference between each product. Which I'm guessing when I upgrade, I'll notice a nice difference?

Can anyone recommend a nice fairly prices I7 & Motherboard combination as I'd like to do away with AMD all together, as I'm sick of it now... It was good, but now it's not cutting it for me. And It's about time I finally gave Intel a try.

Thanks.

 

[popatim]

The only on worth getting is the k edition so you can overclock it.
8350 is fine for what it is, which imo is only half of an intel processor core per core. ie - you need 8 cores to match the performance of an intel 4 core. Now the problem is, and what i suspect your problem is, is what happens when a program cant use 8 cores, only 4? Intel kills it.

Again this is just my opinion and I own 4 AMD rigs and 3 intel rigs. I'm no fan boy.

 

[Phil Green]

Well that's just it,

I've loved AMD forever, since I first bought an AMD Sempron back in 2005; and before that I was using an Intel which I didn't much care for; so I've been a fanboy for a long time with AMD, but I'm just growing sick of the performance... It's great for some games, and other games it will not do anything near to what the "benchmarks" suggest.

I mean, I'd like to be able to play a game without having microstuttering or ten-minute-lag spasms, which is a common occurence, and the FX 8350 was supposed to be what the Bulldozer never was; and don't get me wrong the Piledriver or Vishera or whatever it is named now, is a nice & cheap processor for what it is, but it's no Intel matchup on any par.

I only decided to go for it due to the fact that I'd read some very promising reviews, but in terms of personal aspect and how it runs for me, it isn't what I paid for, it's less than what I paid for. And at the time, I got it when it was just hitting the market, so it should be fixed by now, in terms of patches and performance updates, but still AMD seem to think releasing a processor that has no capability in terms of being put up against HT.

So you think a K edition will solve the problem?

So instead of the FX8350 switch over to an Intel i7 3770k with an ASUS Sabertooth Z77? Of course it's going to set me back a few pennies, but I don't mind as I hope to god that it will fix this awful performance issues I keep having...

For example - Planetside 2 on Warpgate will say CPU - 72FPS and when I'm in other areas it will switch to GPU - 22FPS etc, I understand that when you use the ALT + F toggle to see the FPS, the one being displayed will show what is currently bottlenecking, but come on - an 8350 with a 7970? They should be working together like butter on bread at least.

Anyway, thanks for the tip - I'm going to have to see how much money I've got left now in order to start piecing this thing up.

I also had another question - I'm going to need a new cooler as my H60 isn't all too clever now too, any suggestions, and of course a new case which I've been meaning to change for a long time now as I'm currently on a Zalman Z9 Plus, which I only bought because it had a good deal of cooling, but with a 7970 in there, there's no airflow capabilities any more.

Thanks again,

Phil.

 

[logainofhades]

Have you tried a graphics driver update? Most of your FPS comes from GPU not CPU. No CPU will help you if your GPU driver isn't optimal for the games you are playing due to an update or change in the game. Recent Starcraft II patches, iirc, caused AMD based cards to nosedive in performance in that game. Given the fact that BF3 is working great for you, and this happened after recent updates to the game you are trying to place, I say it is not a CPU issue but a driver issue on the GPU side caused by the updates.

 

[trogdor796]

A Cooler Master Hypere 212 is the best budget cooler out there. Only like $30, and will let you get to like 4.4Ghz easily.

As for AMD, yeah, I've never owned any of their processors. I got into PC gaming on like 2008, and we all know it's gone downhill from there. Don't get me wrong, their video cards are amazing, but their latest CPU's are indeed lacking. Maybe one day when games us over 4 cores they will do better. But right now most games only use 2 cores, with very few using 4, and since intel has much better performance per core they just dominate in this scenario.

However, despite all of this, I feel like you should be getting better performance. I have only played planetside 2 like once, so I don't have much experience with it. It could be a game optimization issue, maybe check their forums for others with AMD processors and see if they all have to issue.

Besides BF3, are there any other games you've tried? I just don't want you to spend over $300 and then be disappointed in the small performance gain. There will always be games and spots where you drop to 40fps, no matter how powerful your CPU and GPU is.

 

[Phil Green]

Well; This is the performance I could only dream of getting out of Planetside 2 on this setup, and believe me - me and this guy here have pretty much the same rig; and his performance is at least 50% better than what I am gaining from my setup,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZavjoU17Ks

And as for the CPU, I do believe my CPU is bottlenecking my GPU and preventing it from hitting a higher frame rate; just on the basis that this guy has his settings on high and he's getting 30Fps WHILE recording, and I have my settings on LOW, and I'm not even hitting 40 at the best of times let alone remaining on a 30FPS steady move.

I don't know what's causing it, and I understand that CPU and GPU are two different things, I'm not a moron ;-) lol, I do know that the CPU has some involvement with the GPU though; and that having a crappy ass CPU will affect a GPU's performance too.

Which is why I was wondering if the CPU I have was praised to be greatly amazing and would make god shiver in it's presence, when in actuality it hardly does anything that was promised on the box.

As for the driver updates, I'm on the latest catalyst control center, and it's had no change to my performance both in and out of games, in fact I get better performance on Battlefield 3 by about 10 frames, whereas planetside 2 is still running as it's crappily-optimised self again.

 

[trogdor796]

Sorry if this has been asked already, but what are your temps while playing, specifically of the CPU cores and GPU? It could be overheating and throttling.

 

[Phil Green]

You know, I don't actually know, I never check to be honest but I know that on idle my CPU's around 40'c-50'c and my GPU about 30'c-40'c on idle, so I don't think it gets too much higher.

I have an AC unit in this room where my PC is, bought it purposely just so that the room would sit around 18'c and not let my unit get too hot. Which, by the way works great in the summer time.

 

[logainofhades]

You may want to check load temps then. 40-50c seems kinda high for idle to me. If BF3 is running fine, then I don't see overheating to be a problem unless Planetside 2 is much more CPU intensive and pushing it just past that thermal limit. I still think your issue is most likely not a hardware one, but a software one. Planetside 2 devs may have borked something with some of their recent updates you mentioned kinda like Blizzard has with some of its Starcraft II updates. An 8350 can handle Crysis 3 which has shown to be a hardware killer. I highly doubt Planetside on low is harder on hardware than Crysis 3 on high.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/crysis-3-performance-benchmark-gaming,3451-8.html

 

[trogdor796]

Just so we can eliminate overheating as a problem, I would download HWMonitor Pro and play a game for like 10 minutes with it running, then window out and check max temps.