Overclocking an A10-6800k as to not bottleneck an HD7970

Hardware Hub Overclocking
1

so recently a bought into the whole apu thing, getting my self an a10-6800k rig, and of course i regret it now, games arent as playable as i thought they would be, even with 2133mhz memmory

anyways my birthday was last week and my girlfriend got me a sapphire 7970 oc 3gb, so now im wondering how much bottlenecking there will be...

is there a way i could optimize/overclock the a10 cpu in such a way (maybe turning off the igpu) that the cpu performance can become significantly better?

ive seen articles where they overclock this cpu to up to 8.2ghz of course i know this would be impossible for me, but maybe a good enough overclock would do the trick.....

i dont want to have to spend a lot of money on a new i5 + mobo

2

What motherboard do you have? 

Also as soon as you put a dedicated card in you will be running off the card the apu's igpu will just be disabled.

3

have a little patience with your rig..

your hardware is good, you are just in a position where you are waiting for the software writers to catch up.

It's the one thing that has made me avoid building an apu rig to date, some of microsofts addition to dx 8.1 are geared PURELY to optimizing apu performance (given their investment in apu kit its hardly surprising).

as for a 6800k bottlenecking a single 7970... as far as I am aware it shouldnt in gpu bound games?

Whenever I see benchmarks for cpus with discrete cards the difference between them (amd and intel) are single digit frame variance... the only ones it falls down to are the games which dump workload on the cpu.

You have to keep in mind that *some* games just seem to hate amd (skyrim springs to mind... which is damn annoying to me as I love the pc version and I am amd :(   ).

4

so recently a bought into the whole apu thing, getting my self an a10-6800k rig, and of course i regret it now, games arent as playable as i thought they would be, even with 2133mhz memmory

 

This is why I hate seeing people suggest APU builds. 6800k is like $150. Pentium G860/Athlon 750k+HD 7770/7790 are the same price.

Guess which one will game better? Winner gets a cookie.

5

Ill take the 7790.

6

There won't be much bottlencking IMO I've disabled hyperthreading and 3 cores on my 3770k plus underclocked it to about 2.5ghz and theres very little "Bottlenecking" with my 7970.

7

^^^ a 3770k is a  million miles away from a (realistically dual core) cheap APU 

8

Indeed but not when its underclocked and set to single core

9

thanks a lot guys for all the responses,,,,, 

by the way, i have an msi a75 motherboard,,,,, which i dont think makes any difference, but anyway

 

i guess im stuck at being patient, i dont really want to spend that much money right now,,, im planning to play more gpu intensive games for now,,, and when i encounter one that really needs a super powerful cpu,,, ill just leave that for next year,,  ill eventually get myself an intel i5 processor and turn my apu rig into an htpc

ill let you guys know how it ends up performing as soon as i have the time to do some testing

10

The A10-6800k beats i3s and is pretty close to i5s under synthetic benchmarks. With that, you won't be getting much bottle-necking with a 7970. Just stick it in run it and have fun. Oh, and "realistically", you will literally not notice much difference between the A10 and an i5 machine. Trust me, I played with an A8 compared to my i5, it's lovely how much you get out of its price.

11

Guys, stop talking about tek for a minute and admire and/or applaud his girlfriend who was awesome enough to buy him a 7970..........

Slow Clap

You, sir, have found a keeper. You know what to do.

P.S. Belated Happy Birthday

12

Okay, back to the tek.

A 6800k should be around as fast as an FX-4300. With that said, I've always been comfortable with suggesting to people builds with an FX-4300 and a 7970/7950, though I also suggest a slight OC if they can manage that. So if you aren't getting the performance you think you should be getting, a slight OC with the stock cooler and/or putting more load on the GPU should do the trick.

13

Exactly what I was thinking.  I was like "where dafuq you find a lady like this?"

14

Yeap, I mean if my girlfriend could even tell me that computers had graphics cards I would pop the question there and then.

15

I'm surprised nobody said anything about overclocking the North Bridge.  AMD's design makes it that the NB handles the graphics/cpu/ram interaction and South Bridge everything else.  Like Z said the CPU is similar to a FX-4300 and i'm pretty sure if you take a look at Jayztwocents video about bottlenecking it shows that even a bottom of the barrel i5 can handle just about anything on games.  Intel doesn't have a north bridge because their controller is built into the chip.  On AMD's side, we can overclock the NB to something like 2400 and CPU/NB 2400 and it should fix most of your problems.  Overclocking the CPU does help but it's less effective than NB adjustment.  Since you are going with video card i would not suggest getting high bandwidth ram mainly because the higher the bandwidth the harder it is to overclock NB, mainly because of voltage.  Stick with CL 9 1600mhz RAM that runs 1.5v. This puts less stress on the NB and allows for more overclocking headroom. You have to treat the board like a 990fx board because the FM socket specific won't matter to your needs.

Also i found out that with HSA for next generation, the iGPU will have capabilities to help the CPU on loads.  So maybe it's coming close to the time where the standard CPU is lagging behind compared to GPU advancements.

Hopefully that helps a bit.

16

Thanks again for all of the responses

 

I still havent downloaded fraps so i cant really say what the exact fps woud be, although ive read that fraps really ups the load (specially on an amd apu like the 6800k)

but i can tell you i have tried the following games

Black Mesa

Comand and conquer 4

ff7 with a bunch of mods

skyrim

farcry 3 

farcry 3 blood dragon

crysis 3

tomb raider

bioshock infinite

..... i feel like im missing a couple more but you get the point,,, ive tried a bunch of games and they all play awesome,,,, it feels like even if my cpu is bottlenecking my gpu, it doesnt matter,, its not bottlenecking it enough to make a big difference

all of the games ive tried play incredibly well,,, i alway use the maximum settings on everything

the only thing is that i have a 1080p monitor so thats the resolution i use,,, i havent been able to try 1440p or anything like that so i dont know how well it would do in that case, but now im begining to think that i made an excellent choice with this 6800k 

i spent probably half of what i would have spent otherwise and eveything looks and plays amazingly

i probably will eventually get myself an i5 and use this 6800k for an htpc but now theres no hurry,,, i have yet to find a game that stutters on my machine and i doubt i will find one soon,,,, plus if it does happen to come along,, ill just bring the settings down to high instead of ultra LOL :)

 

anyways i hope this helps someone who is looking for this type of info

 

(by the way,, i hope my girlfriend would know what a graphics card is, but the truth is we choose our gifts and this year we decided they were going to be $300 gifts so i chose the 7970 cause i found it on sale for $299,, i guess thats my explanation for not popping the question right then and there, LOL, i guess girls that would really know about a 7970 are like unicorns, mystical creatures from myth, at least thats my experience, there might be other pistols out there but i havent seen any in real life)