Processor Bottlenecking

[Crowes]

Back in 2013 around January, I bought a a computer of what Linus calls a "boutique" builder. I don't know what we call them here in the UK, but it's basically the same thing. The original specifications of that were the following:

 

[2013 - Full Year]

Processor: AMD (FM2) A6-4500K @ 3.6GHz w/ AMD Radeon HD7540D Integrated Graphics  --- Link

Motherboard: ASRock FM2A55M-DGS --- Link

Random Access Memory: (Unknown Brand) 8.00GB Single-Channel DDR3 @ 798MHz (11-11-11-30)

Storage (OS & Programs): 500GB Seagate ST500DM0 Sata Disk Device

Optical Drive: TSSTcorp CDDVDW SH-224BB SATA CDRom Device

Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium SP1

 

 

 

 

 

I used it for a whole year for just school work, and it was fine. 2013 was my "hiccup" year, as I had only minor issues that I learned to fix myself or through the help of the person I bought it off (we stay in contact). This year, 2014, around March-May, I upgraded the computer to run games. The specifications were then:

 

[2014 - May-Present Day]

Processor: AMD (FM2) A6-4500K @ 3.6GHz w/ AMD Radeon HD7540D Integrated Graphics  --- Link

Motherboard: ASRock FM2A55M-DGS --- Link

Random Access Memory: (Unkown Brand) 8.00GB Single-Channel DDR3 @ 798MHz (11-11-11-30)

Graphics: 2.00GB ATI AMD Radeon R7 260X by MSI

Storage (Games): 500GB Seagate ST500DM0 Sata Disk Device

Storage (OS and Programs): 126GB Samsung SSD 840 Evo Sata Disk Device

Optical Drive: TSSTcorp CDDVDW SH-224BB SATA CDRom Device

Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium SP1

 

After I got it, I didn't use it for about four months (for which I intended the upgrade: gaming), as my exams were coming and revision was all-the-rage (I'm joking, it was horrible!), so my computer spent most of it's days downloading or turned off. When i got to use it this summer, I played a couple of games I bought in the Steam Summer Sale; such as Tomb Raider, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Dead Space and Assassin's Creed 2, all of which got very similar performance, with the exception of Dead Space (which ran perfectly, and only crashed once throughout the whole play-through). All the said games seemed to run alright, but stuttered when loading in the world, or something else I wasn't aware of was happening. I ignored it and enjoyed the game anyway. 

 

A while later, I got into one particular multiplayer game, and I haven't played much other than that since, probably due to it's addictiveness and the community revolving around a particular server.

 

 

 

Just about a week ago, I tried playing Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, and noticed that I wasn't getting a smooth 40-50FPS, but a somewhat fluctuating 20-30. Thirty isn't bad from an ex-PS3 user's perspective, but the drops and rises are quite noticeable, especially when you get a solid 60FPS in the menus. Dissappointing, really. I wanted to find the source of the issue, so I ran the game, ran around with the person in-game a bit, then tabbed out quickly to check the resource monitor in the background: my CPU usage shot up to a 100%, and as Linus said in his bottlenecking video, that is a core (bad pun) sign or bottlenecking. So, I window-shopped around a little, and I've got my eye on one AMD A10-6800K APU running at 4.1GHz and 4.5GHz at Turbo (I don't know what "Turbo" is, so It'd be nice if someone could help me there).Is this a good choice? Is my CPU actually the bottleneck?

 

Oh, and one last question. Is that RAM bad for gaming? 798MHz doesn't sound great in comparison to many people on these forums talking about up to 2800MHz speeds.

[Notree]

APU's aren't really meant for use with dedicated gpu's. Id suggest ditching the idea of another apu and save up for a cpu like 8350 or and i5 if you can save enough. Your ram is running at 1600mhz. DDR stands for double data rate.

[Crowes]

APUs aren't really meant for use with dedicated GPUs. Id suggest ditching the idea of another apu and save up for a cpu like 8350 or and i5 if you can save enough.

 

 

How would it fair? I mean, the guy I talk to about this sort of thing say it'll be fine, and at Quad-Core and 4.1Ghz, I would think the performance would vastly increase. Oh, and he also said mixing AMD and Intel or vice versa isn't a great idea, as for your suggestion of an i5; but I'll definitely keep the FX8350 in mind,since it only costs an extra £30 and all.

[TheSLSAMG]

How would it fair? I mean, the guy I talk to about this sort of thing say it'll be fine, and at Quad-Core and 4.1Ghz, I would think the performance would vastly increase. Oh, and he also said mixing AMD and Intel or vice versa isn't a great idea, as for your suggestion of an i5; but I'll definitely keep the FX8350 in mind,since it only costs an extra £30 and all.

If the guy said that mixing AMD and Intel isn't good, he doesn't know his shit. Intel make powerful CPUs, AMD make powerful GPUs. There is no favoritism in how the hardware works with different platforms based upon brand, only upon how good the hardware really is. And the RAM is Double Data Rate, it reads in an OS as 1/2 it's rated speed.

[Redheadsrule13]

If you don't want to get a new motherboard, go with the FX8350, that'll do you fine. And anyone saying that you shouldn't mix Intel or AMD is either a fanboy trying to keep you on one side, or they straight up don't know what they're talking about.

[Crowes]

Ah, but my motherboard is an FM2(A55M-DGS), so it does not support AM3+ Processors (FX8350).

 

Anyway, if I havea  dedicated GPU, won't that just take over the graphics processing from the APU meaning that the APU acts like a CPU?

[vlkn´]

The Apu will be shutdown if you use a dedicated GPU, you´ll probably get the best performance if you upgrade your graphicscard, unless you are planning to upgrade to a i5 and pay for every 100$ more to earn 10fps-max20fps over your old cpu. (and this is the case with a powerful gpu)

 

Btw: You can´t always rate the performance on the the price of the cpu, as example Intel extreme cpus.

[Crowes]

You know when someone asks for help and they go against your word anyway? Well, yeah, I kinda did that. I got the 6800K from AMD because of the following reasons, and it fit in my socket, unlike the FX suggested above. Apologies, but when I asked this, I didn't expect to get tons of performance from a new CPU, and I wasn't planning on spending much over £150. I wanted to remove the bottleneck, not upgrade solely.

 

I'm getting nearly double the FPS on some games, and yes, 10-20 more on others, but that 10-20 can be the difference between "playable" and not. All my games get over 30FPS, and many of them around 60FPS, so I'm chuffed.

 

This APU seems to be just right for me. Thanks for all your help.

[Jack.EXE]

you could get an athlon x4 740, $60 quad core.

[Crowes]

you could get an athlon x4 740, $60 quad core.

 

 

I got the 6800K from AMD because of the following reasons, and it fit in my socket, unlike the FX suggested above. 

[Jack.EXE]

 

Too late then, .

 

the 760K is the 6800K minus iGPU, and the 740 is a lower clocked version, which you can OC

[Crowes]

Too late then, .

 

the 760K is the 6800K minus iGPU, and the 740 is a lower clocked version, which you can OC

 

Thanks for the assistance anyway, even if it was a little late.