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Started by Ro-Tang Clan | | 23 answers
Will an AMD FX-8320 bottleneck 2x GTX 980 cards?
Currently I have an AMD FX-8320 comfortably overclocked to 4.7GHz and paired with a single MSI GTX 770 Lightning card. This works well and I'm able to crank the graphical settings up to "ultra" but I'm not able to turn anti-aliasing on without significant framerate drops. It becomes laggy and unresponsive. As a person who wants the best, I want to upgrade.

I've been looking at the Asus GTX 980 STRIX card and I'm considering buying two of them. However I'm concerned I will not see the full gain from them if the CPU is the bottleneck. Can anyone advise please?
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October 17, 2014 8:41:02 AM

I all ways built amd but for me its a dead end seeing I done upgraded all I could in the am3+ platform with out going to that 220w blast heater

but I never seen where the 6100 or the 8350 really hurt me as far as what you asked and I don't see them cards and that chip you got being a big issue ..
more then likely it will end up a non issue overall

it may fall short here and excel there just like they all do the only thing is you got to buy and try to see for your self and 100 folks can say its great and you may find it sucks for you or vice versa and what works on this system may not as well on another
October 17, 2014 8:11:56 AM

Most games only require single thread performance on CPU, FX8320's single thread performance is only 1403 in passmark, even the G3258 performs 50% better than FX8320 in single thread.
AMD is hopeless.
October 17, 2014 7:39:39 AM

its not like the chip will suffer due to graphics but it still comes down to how well your chip processes the info

you take something like super pi my 8350 will do a calculation lets say 18 sec. my intel 4670 will do it in 9 sec. my 6100 will do it in 23 sec.

a lot can go on and can vary from system to system and todays vid cards are pretty well made to do just about all the work in them selves I got some programs the the gpu is at 98% and the cpu if flat lined and some the pound them both or uses the cpu more then the gpu

so it comes down to a well balanced rig for your needs
October 17, 2014 7:20:41 AM

The term bottleneck is used way too much on this website, if you have any idea about computers you will know that this won't bottleneck. This situation isn't extreme enough to bottle neck
October 17, 2014 5:20:28 AM

I may be wrong but it looks like 4k is still amd'd strong point overall NVidia looks to struggle there [???]
October 16, 2014 4:46:58 PM

junkeymonkey said:
I had another link with another bench on that but cant find it but it showed near the same thing

don't know if this one helps you any

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/4323464


Oh man, I don't think I've ran Firestrike since I was benching my Phenom II X4 965BE with a GTX660 card. I'll have to bench my rig and test against that score, but cheers for the links you've provided. As I mentioned earlier though, the only reason I was going specifically for SLI GTX 980 was to futureproof for a 4k setup. I don't have the budget for it anymore, but even if I did, looking at the benchmarks it doesn't look like now is the time for it anyway.

For the current performance gain I want (max out everything including AA) I'm better off SLI'ing my current card, a GTX 770 Lightning. Since the Lightning is now a rare card and out of production, I couldn't find any to purchase which is why I was going for a GTX 980 as an upgrade. But then it got me thinking I could get two for 4k. So that's the reasoning behind it all.

Now that the new GTX 900 series are quite popular, a few 770 Lightning cards have become available on ebay as people have most likely ditched them in favour for the 980 cards making SLI 770 a viable option again. The performance of SLI 770 is about on par with a single 980 card, but the difference lies in price. The STRIX card is £500 and ebay lightning card is £160. It's a no brainer right now, especially now establishing SLI 980 doesn't deliver 4k at a average framerate much above 60fps. I've lost interest in them now.

October 16, 2014 3:41:31 PM

TheConsiderateIlliterate said:
Benchmarks can be deceptive. Now if you're playing single player games then you should be getting 60 fps on ultra but once you take the 8320 to the multiplayer realm, it's a different story. Multiplayer is much more taxing on the CPU.

For example, you won't be getting constant 60 FPS in heavily multiplayer games such as Planetside 2.

It's too bad there is no good way to perform accurate multiplayer benchmarks.

Yeah you raise a good point, although not applicable to me as I don't competitively game in multiplayer games. Just a couple indie games and Borderlands 2 are the only titles I play with multiple people on. Although I do see where you're coming from and how it would affect others who do.



Many thanks for the link and it is as I predicted, 2-way SLI GTX 980's are hovering around 60fps and sometimes dipping below and pitching above that too. Shucks, well I think i'm going to wait a couple years till 4k @ 140Hz+ is a more affordable solution.

However, what I didn't predict is the FX-8350 at STOCK clocks is keeping up with that monster of a 12 threaded Intel CPU and less than half the price. That's incredible. It's looking like the higher the resolution the more GPU dependent it will become so the CPU doesn't matter as much. It's nice to know I don't have to rid myself of this AMD rig and build an Intel one at twice the cost to get to 4k.
October 16, 2014 2:47:01 PM

Benchmarks can be deceptive. Now if you're playing single player games then you should be getting 60 fps on ultra but once you take the 8320 to the multiplayer realm, it's a different story. Multiplayer is much more taxing on the CPU.

For example, you won't be getting constant 60 FPS in heavily multiplayer games such as Planetside 2.

It's too bad there is no good way to perform accurate multiplayer benchmarks.

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