What ram and motherboard do you have and what games are you playing you should have seen some gains in fps even if there is a bottleneck
I have to clock my FX 6300 to 4.2ghz to satisfy my 7950. 3.8 to 4.2 gave a big gain but 4.2ghz to 4.4ghz only a couple fps. The FX 6300s are just a bit over 100$ in North America and are pretyy good bang for buck.
Trouble is, the Phenom 965 competes with the FX6300 in gaming performance:
http://cpuboss.com/cpus/AMD-Phenom-II-X4-965-vs-AMD-FX-6300
I'd say overclock your processor, and install different drivers for the 7950. The Phenom 965 shouldn't bottleneck a single high-end GPU.
What are the rest of the specs of your system?
If anything doesnt work try to install fresh copy of windows.
What's the speed of your NB? IF it's under 2200Mhz, you'll probably see performance bottlenecks. Try to raise the NB to 2200-2600Mhz; those tend to be the sweet spot. on my FX-8350, i've got it at 2400mhz which is the limit of my performance gain with gpu.
I was testing an overclock of an athlon x3, unlocked to a phenom 2 x4. 3.2GHz. It only dropped my 7950s FPS by like, 4 in unigen.
So. Yeah.
i also think that the phenom could probably be a bottleneck. a FX8320 or 8350, is never a bad upgrade option, but its offcourse very important which motherboard you currently have. i recommend a decent 990FX chipset board. for those high end FX83xx cpu´s
^This. While the NB does not make much difference on newer CPU's, it is critical to getting the most out of a Phenom.
my is at 2500 mhz
I have a as rock 970 extreme 3 and pny 8gb @ 1333 mghz
I have an as rock 970 extreme 3
Monitor the cpu and gpu usage in-game. If the cpu usage is close to 100% while the gpu is well below 100%, then you have yourself a bottleneck. If the usage is about the same on both, then you don't really have any need to upgrade anything. It is worth a check before spending money.
Ok i want to give everyone an update. Now for some reason im getting some wierd artifacting which is just a shit ton of green dots all over the screen but the wierd thing is i was getting the same issue with my 7850 before. Is it possible that my motherboard is causing me all these problems.
Nvm haha it was actually just a loose cable :/
Ok so i did some benchmarks and the cpu usage and gpu usage are about the same maybe 10-15% difference in some occasions but mostly the same. But one the graphics card never goes higer than %65 and same goes for the processor no matter which game I play and im still getting around the same frame rate as i was getting for my 7850.
Can you check per core usage? IT is possible that the games aren't using all of the cores and that is causing the cpu usage to not reach 100% and that it actually is causing a bottleneck. Here is a link if you don't know how to check per core usage. I set it up myself and love to have it running in-game just so I can keep an eye on things.
http://www.overclock.net/t/1229915/how-to-cpu-and-gpu-usage-along-with-fps-in-game
a loose power cable? What was it exactly? Would be intresting...
ok so all my cores never go to 100 percent highest i usaully see is around 70 percent in arma 2 crysis 2 and saints rowe the third and two of the cores usually flip flop at 10-20 percent higer than the other two cores but in crysis 2 im seing about 80-95 percent gpu usage arma 2 about 40-60 percent gpu usage and in saints rowe im only seing 40-60 percent gpu usage.
no it was a loose dvi cable like it was not all the way plugged in