FX-8320 w/ GTX970 2-way SLI. Will there be bottlenecks?

[Opcode]

According to toms benchmarks the FX-8350 even at 4.4 GHz bottlenecks a pair of HD 7970's bad. Here are a few more benchmarks done with a GTX 690 and the FX-8350 even at 4.8 GHz still falls short of a stock i5-2500k in some games. So personally I would buy just one GTX 970 for now, and replace the motherboard and CPU (i5-4690k) in your system with what it costs for the second GTX 970. You can always buy another GTX 970 later to drop in for SLI. Core performance is more important than core count, you can thank Microshit for that.

[Sintezza]

I already posted proof. It's on the 4th page

Not even unlocked, but locked i3/i5 is better than 8350.

 

haha you are funny dude

 

p.s i never said that there wont be a bottleneck with sli by the way.

There allways will be at a certain point.

[nokturrduk84]

haha you are funny dude

 

p.s i never said that there wont be a bottleneck with sli by the way.

There allways will be at a certain point.

Now that's another story

[Faceman]

Piggybacking on what OpCode has said.  If you read the entire Tom's Hardware benchmark, you see that FPS is not the only metric by which to evaluate performance.  Frame time is the other metric that plays a monumental roll in the fluidity and smoothness of game play.

 

Here is an article that explains frame times.

Why Frame Times are Important

 

Now that you understand what Frame Times are and why they are important, check out these benchmarks:

Best CPU for Gaming - 9 Processors Tested

Processors Tested

Choosing a Gaming CPU

 

While the FPS is higher with Intel, I want you to take a look at the frame times.  They are almost twice as fast in a lot of the games benchmarked, even an i3.

 

If you are gaming, you want an Intel processor.

 

     I am currently playing Archeage, have been pretty hardcore for the past few days. I am in a guild already and the topic of framedrops is brought up quite often.  Maybe you don't play MMOs, but I am giving an example here.  The players with FX8 processors, they aren't having a fun time.  If you are going solo by yourself, ya you're fine, but if you are grouping, doing an instances dungeon, or raiding, it is unplayable.  A big part of the game is PvP, and stealth.  These FX players say that often times they will get the initial hit indicator, their FPS drops so low that when they recover, they are already half HP and too far behind to do anything.  Forget raiding, its not happening because the raid sizes are massive.  I even refused to let one of the healers in my guild run through a dungeon with us because they had an FX processor.  After a lot of arguing, I eventually said fine, I wont go, take someone else.  You know how far they got?  Not far.

 

     When I asked these guys where they got their information on PC building, I wasn't surprised to hear websites like CPUBoss, and CPU Passmark get mentioned.  These people were duped into buying a bad product, and when you come out here and say that an FX processor is going to perform the same as an i5, you are lying to yourself, and lying to others.  Stop it.  This is other people's money, and no one, NO ONE likes dealing with problems when it comes to their gaming rig, especially when its a brand new game that they just build a PC for and aren't getting the results they were lead to believe they would get.

 

     At any budget, an Intel processor offers a much better gaming solution.  Forget overclocking, single core performance is king in the world of gaming.  Games aren't being designed for more than 2-4 cores, and we are a long way off from it happening.

This is the Tech Talk with the Intel Engineer, with a question specifically from me on June 20th of this year:

 

Start listening at minute 24:30

 

--"Game developers have been telling us for years that Hyperthreading and more cores will have a more linear effect on performance, and for years this has remain untrue.  Do you think Hyperthreading will soon show more profound performance gains when it comes to gaming in the near future?  If so, how long?  It seems like it has been 3 or more years that recommended specs have been telling us to buy i7s, yet the performance difference is negligible when comparing an i5 and i7.  Does it make sense to try and "future proof" by going with an i7 over an i5."

 

--"Realistically what game developers do is develop to the lowest common denominator, which is still 2 cores."

 

Another soundbite at Minute 33:30:

 

"Why would we release a consumer grade chip with 6 cores when software is not taking advantage of it?"

 

He says that rhetorically.

 

"Dual core is the bottom of the stack....We are moving forward as the software calls for it, but until we see demand for 6/8/10/12 cores in the mainstream world, what advantage would Intel have at releasing these parts, that can't really be utilized, it is really a niche place for 8 threads to be utilized."

 

The most telling moment of the stream starts at minute 60, there is too much to list word for word so I will summarize:

 

Intel wants more thread utilization, they want to push us up the stack because technology is there.  They are frustrated that software hasn't caught up, but when you look on Steam, and you see what kind of systems people have, the vast majority is dual core.  So if I'm a game developer I am designing the game for dual core because that is where the money is.

 

Listen to the stream starting from minute 60, and you will understand that games are not being made for more than 4 threads and why strong cores are more important than many cores with higher clock speeds.

[vern021]

Piggybacking on what OpCode has said.  If you read the entire Tom's Hardware benchmark, you see that FPS is not the only metric by which to evaluate performance.  Frame time is the other metric that plays a monumental roll in the fluidity and smoothness of game play.

 

Here is an article that explains frame times.

Why Frame Times are Important

 

Now that you understand what Frame Times are and why they are important, check out these benchmarks:

Best CPU for Gaming - 9 Processors Tested

Processors Tested

Choosing a Gaming CPU

Going to read this for a while. The articles are very long.

[Faa]

Now that's another story

Called backpedaling.

[i_build_nanosuits]

Called backpedaling.

Faa could you do me a favor, i've been reading a lot of the faceman crap lately and ALL he talks about now is ''frametime'' and while this being very relevant and important for games FRAMETIME has NOTING to do with the CPU but it only depends on HOW the GPU is EFFICIENT at rendering the frames out...the CPU has strictly NOTHING to do with FRAMETIME...i'd love to correct him myself but he ignore me i can't communicate to him...just quote me so he might want to do more research on that topic and stop spitting shit about AMD CPU and FRAMETIME cause yes they bottleneck most mid to high range cards in many games but they are not responsible for bad frametime and micro-stutterings...GPU's are, not CPU.

[JJBtch4EXG]

I have a 8320 with tri 970s ftw+ and when it was just dual at stock I didn't notice any bottlenecks but could just be me being satisfied with my frames. I also just ordered myself a 9590 today which will arrive tomorrow. A major overkill for me but hey why not?

[s3ns3]

On 11.04.2016 at 11:22 PM, JJBtch4EXG said:

I have a 8320 with tri 970s ftw+ and when it was just dual at stock I didn't notice any bottlenecks but could just be me being satisfied with my frames. I also just ordered myself a 9590 today which will arrive tomorrow. A major overkill for me but hey why not?

because you should have got an i5 for that money. also sell the 8320 and mobo and get an intel motherboard