I’m using an i5 3470 and rx 480 (8gb ram single channel) and I’m pretty sure at this stage the CPU is bottle-necking the GPU. I’d like to be able to play games like The witcher series, GTA 5 at some point on relatively high settings. I did a fresh install of skyrim and added quite a few mods ( I used gophers current mod list as a starter point which don’t seem to be that graphically intensive) and I’m getting an average 30 fps. I get the impression if I upgraded my CPU, RAM and mobo I would see a huge increase in performance or am I being too optimistic? Also should I go with 2nd gen ryzen or stick with 1st gen as there can’t be a significant difference between the two? I’d also like to be able to do gpu passthrough at some point so I don’t have to duel boot. Thanks for replies in advance.
I don’t think modding skyrim makes it more CPU intensive (most of the time). At least not significantly.
But… there is a relatively simple way to find out. just monitor GPU usage with something like MSI Afterburner while you’re playing the game. If it’s close to max you’re GPU bound most likely still otherwise your CPU is the bottleneck.
Thanks, it something I should have tested before asking, I’ll test it when I get home. I don’t hold much hope for it though, my money is on the CPU to be the one struggling.
Yeah exactly, which makes me feel I definitely need an upgrade but it’ll include RAM and mobo as well unfortunately. It’s the special edition so I guess you still have to account for the new textures but it still shouldn’t be an issue for the RX480.
Upgrade that to dual channel RAM and boost OC that CPU to 4Ghz.
The 3470 is about 3.6Ghz Boost stock IIRC.
I have an older i5-3450 (3.5GHz) around on a Gigabyte Z77-UD3H board In my old system.
It’s got 16Gb of DDR3 1600MHz with a R9 380 GPU and is boost overclocked to 3.9GHz.
The single Core performance at those speeds is about close to a Ryzen 7 1700 single core performance. Plenty for most modern games.
Add a good cooler and OC it using the boost states. You can go 400Mhz above the stock boost multipliers even on locked CPU’s.
Plays most modern games really damn well. 60FPS 1080p at quite high settings.
Also check that your hard disk isn’t just being really slow.
Also keep in mind that that some Skyrim mods are absolute shite when it comes to performance impact.
Particularly a lot of the shader and texture/model mods can absolutely butcher performance because they are built in idiotic ways.
Maybe a synthetic benchmark isn’t the worst idea. Try firestrike with current settings and then with OC on the CPU. If the graphics score makes a big jump, you have been starving the GPU to some degree. Also look at the temps.
I’m not really useful here I think. I have been out of windows for years…
This is probably the best approach before replacing everything. I’ll look into getting another stick of RAM and a decent cooler. My motherboard is a MSI H61M-P31-G3 which I’m guessing should be fine for overclocking even though its a cheap motherboard.
Oh that’s a shame. In the meantime I’ll check the GPU and CPU usage and go from there. Its looking like an upgrade is the most sensible and only option and I can’t see duel channel giving me an extra 30 fps in skyrim haha.
Ram might be the best reason to hold off for now.
A bit more DDR3 second hand off EBay might tide you over, while you save up for the upgrade, as you will need CPU, mobo and DDR4 ram either way, and DDR4 is costly.
I am a shill for AMD, and the senseMi on the new Ryzen chipset looks very attractive, but you may benefit from an intel chip with higher clocks/lower cores… for a gaming only rig, you may be able so squeeze a few more FPS ‘s from a team blue chip.
If you are looking for more of n all-rounder, the first gem Ryzen chips are good, especially with a newer BIOS/UEFI for memory compatibility and may end up cheaper, especially if you went second hand
Yeah an upgrade will be imminent. As for team blue vs red, I am not sure… I’ll probably mostly be gaming on the machine as I do my coding on my desktop at work and any code I do at home is small projects which will probably be done on my raspberry pi. So it kind of opens up the war between amd and intel for gaming but there’s no need to start that here, I’ll probably do a thorough search online to see what will be the most appropriate. But off the top of my head I’ve read about shady stuff intel have been doing and amd is reasonably cheaper and similar performance so it seems a no brainer to go amd but I will have to properly research.
