Bottlenecking my 5870?

[Ollie30001]

specs are:

CPU: Athlon 64 x2 3.2GHZ Black Edition 6400+
RAM: 4GB 800MHZ DDR2
GFX: XFX 5870 GPU at 900mhz MEM at 1300mhz
HDD 80GIG Maxtor 7200rpm (temp replacement of my failed 10,000rpm raptor )
MOBO: ASUS M2N-E SLI
PSU: 800WATT Thermaltake crossfire/sli ready (not sure exactly but over 30amp on 12 volt rails)

Got latest drivers for everything cat 10.5 ect. Temps are all around 50-55 under load for cpu, gpu ect. Games are all patched. Services have been tweaked for minimal background mem and cpu usage. Virus scans and spyware scans are done regular.

Every game gets reduced to a 20 frame per second crawl multiple times during gaming including oldies like counter strike source when things get hectic. I cant see the 5870 having trouble so im thinking my cpu is holding it back?

 

[Burty117]

Correct! its the CPU!

I have almost the exact same setup,

Only difference I have is an Nvidia GTX260 and 8GB of RAM & a WD hard drive.

I had this same issue with crysis and CS:S

The way I stopped it was to overclock my CPU now going at 3.8Ghz,

RAM is still going at 800Mhz

I'll keep an eye on this thread cos i'm interested on what everyone else has to say, but I can tell you that the proccessor is probably the bottleneck of the system!

 

[Arris]

Some games are very CPU dependent. Look at the graphs on this Xbit review showing different performance with a variety of CPUs. I know for one that the Source engine is one such example.

 

[Ritwik7]

Every game gets reduced to a 20 frame per second crawl multiple times during gaming including oldies like counter strike source when things get hectic.

I don't think that Source would have any issues working on that setup. At least with CS:Source the issue is different.

I had a Pentium 4 with a 9800GT and the only game that bottlenecked was Crysis. MW and MW2 worked well enough.

 

[Ollie30001]

Looks like a cpu upgrade is the best option for me then as overclocking on this mobo is almost non existant. Thats amazing by the way that you got 3.8 out of that chip, you must be water cooling?

Its also amazing how a Phenom ll x4 at 4.1ghz can perform that much less than a Core i7 Quad at the same speed in all the tests. Cant beat AMD for price tho so cant realy complain.

Think a mobo upgrade is well over due as well as this was just a temp replacement for one i fried nearly 2 years ago now i think lol

 

[Arris]

Looks like a cpu upgrade is the best option for me then as overclocking on this mobo is almost non existant. Thats amazing by the way that you got 3.8 out of that chip, you must be water cooling?

Its also amazing how a Phenom ll x4 at 4.1ghz can perform that much less than a Core i7 Quad at the same speed in all the tests. Cant beat AMD for price tho so cant realy complain.

Think a mobo upgrade is well over due as well as this was just a temp replacement for one i fried nearly 2 years ago now i think lol

Note though that the difference in performance between the processors is a lot smaller at higher resolutions. I'm guessing that it might be the vram limitations for processing the larger resolutions that brings down the gap.