Where does my CPU start to bottleneck?

[Uhl]

Budget (including currency): N/A

Country: UK

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Gaming - Elite Dangerous, Hogwarts Legacy, F1 2022 etc

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): 

 

Ok, so I currently have a DELL T5500 which has dual Xeon X5650 which run at 2.66Ghz across 2 processors (6 cores each, 12 threads total; 12 cores 24 threads), GTX 1080 (waterforce), 72Gb RAM, SSD boot and gaming drives (SATA) and spinning rust large drive running Windows 10 Pro.

 

I've been looking to update my graphics card (I am also on the lookout for 2x 5680 or 5690 processors) but am aware that should I go too high the CPU will be the bottleneck and I was wondering how far I could go up the GeForce line? (the machine has a 1000w PSU as standard)

 

The 1080 is still a great card for me, plays most things at high settings at 1080p (monitor bound). I am quite happy with this but just thinking ahead a little want the machine to still be working fine come the end of Win10 support (when I will start from scratch with building the 3x rigs we need here for me and the kids).

 

So, which is the best (cheapest) GeForce card I can put in this machine which will push the CPU to it's limit? (also, if I upgrade the processors).

 

If you need the FULL specs of the machine see below.

 

 

 

OpenHardwareMonitor.Report.txt

[Fasauceome]

17 minutes ago, Uhl said:

I've been looking to update my graphics card (I am also on the lookout for 2x 5680 or 5690 processors)

with only a 21% boost to maximum clock speed on the 5690 compared to the 5650, you may not see a very meaningful improvement to performance. When it comes to needing a major GPU upgrade in the future for you, I would recommend it comes with a CPU upgrade as well.

[RONOTHAN##]

Upgrade the CPUs. At 4GHz I'd be expecting those chips to be a liability, let alone at stock. They're incredibly slow and missing a good chuck of modern instructions that games do use (IIRC hogwarts legacy uses AVX, which X58 can't do), just not worth running for anything more than for fun. Pretty much any mildly competent 6 core will completely crush it in performance, a 2600x for instance should get you about the same multi core performance but much higher single core performance without missing modern instructions, and you should be able to get a board and CPU for less than $150

[thrasher_565]

the 1080 is all ready probably the fasted you want for that socket. the xeon w3680 would help in games but like RONOTHAN said it might not play newer games. no idea how 2 cpus work for games. it may or may not work.

 

probly a cheap x58mb and X5650 oced to 4.0 would probly be faster. but its an old system.

Edited March 11, 2023 by thrasher_565

[Uhl]

That's really great info chaps, thanks.

 

It's interesting to note that with OpenHardwareMonitor running while Hogwarts is playing shows all 12 cores running instructions, was quite surprised with that myself.

 

Always quite impressed with the gaming performance for this old kit but I do appreciate it is now running out of steam.