Wondering about potential CPU bottleneck...

[R-T-B]

Hi, new poster to this site. I'm trying to get one last hurrah out of my Socket 939 system (shown in my profile) before a motherboard upgrade, and am planning on doing this by getting a pair of these cards and putting them in crossfire:

http://extreme-pc.ca/showproduct.asp?productid=371414&menu1id=12&menu2id=99&menu3id=39

Of course, considering I'm pretty much bound by the finest CPU's and RAM of the 939 architecture (which I have), I'm wondering how bad the bottleneck for these cards would be with my good ol' opty 185 and low latency OCZ ram... I'm sure there'll be some, but is it enough to warrant a full upgrade of my motherboard over? How much of a performance increase can I expect from that? Mind you my goal here is to run Oblivion smoothly at max settings, and as it is I'm afraid my uber editions X1950's just aren't cutting it.

Thanks in advance, I appreciate it!

 

[anticlutch]

If you're planning on playing the game at a high resolution along with the max settings, then I doubt the CPU will bottleneck too much.

 

[R-T-B]

Yeah? I heard some people here say the 6000+ bottlenecked those cards, so I was getting concerned. But I guess it's all relative... As long as I can play Oblivion at max settings, I'll be happy (for now anyhow...)

 

[Sovereign]

Your system may be S939 but I don't think theres going to be much of a problem with bottlenecking with your rig judging by your specs! I honestly don't think you have anything to worry about so go ahead and get em!

 

[mullered07]

how can you say theres going to be no problem with bottlenecking, if he cant run oblivion at full max smoothly with 2 x1950xtx then he already has a bottleneck imo those cards should cope wth oblivion easily i think your are bottlenecked already, what res do run at btw ?

 

[R-T-B]

1600x1200 with no AA and a reasonable amount of anisotropic filtering.

Of course, I should note it's easy to run at these settings with what the game considers "high" with my current hardware, however, once I start cranking up the drawing distances and everything to their max (something the default little drop-down box doesn't do), I get some lag. It's not terrible, but it does dip below/around 20FPS at times, and that's when it starts to bother me.

Is that all that unusual for a X1950 setup like mine? I mean it's definently playable at rediculessly high settings man, but not true "max" once you get into all the little nooks and crannies, esspecially with things like grass and specular distance.

anyhow, if I should be able to run it at highest-of-highest with my current rig no problem, pleas do let me know before I go and waste money on the wrong part when I very well may have something far more fundemental wrong here.

 

[DrunkenMafia]

From what I believe, X1950xtx crossfire is still slightly slower than a 320mb 8800gts. Correct me if I am wrong.

Now I know that a single 8800gts can not play oblivion at max settings all that well, sli can fine.

Therefore a single 2900xt will be slightly better than your crossfire setup.

So 2 of em should be a lot better.

the only problem would be the bottleneck. I am unsure of how much you would notice it. It might be a good idea to ask around. I am pretty sure mandelore has an opty 185 with a 2900XT. He may be able to help you out a little. If he thinks that his 2900XT isn't bottlenecked by his cpu then go for it.

Your ram is the shit, and faster than a standard 800mhz kit anyways so it is only really a quiestion of your cpu and FSB.

 

[R-T-B]

From what I believe, X1950xtx crossfire is still slightly slower than a 320mb 8800gts. Correct me if I am wrong.

I think your about right on that one. Mind you mine are overclocked, but that probably doesn't make that huge of a difference. For our purposes, I'm going to assume they are about the same, and pray this bottleneck doesn't slow me down. Either way, I imagine I'll see an improvement, which is good. I just hope I can reach my goal.

 

[KennyT772]

Your opty should overclock to 3ghz easily maybe even 3.2. Why not overclock it so you no longer have to worry? Other then that, don't upgrade you won't see much of a gain.

 

[R-T-B]

Your opty should overclock to 3ghz easily maybe even 3.2. Why not overclock it so you no longer have to worry? Other then that, don't upgrade you won't see much of a gain.

Yeah, I would've done that already if my opty had an unlocked clock multiplier. I used to overclock all the time that way back when that was the norm. Unfortunately, it doesn't, and so I guess I have to go the FSB route. Shouldn't be too hard I guess, but don't I need to ramp up my ram speeds to see any real benefit when overclocking FSB speeds? Right now they are running at DDR400 with super low latency settings.

Thanks in advance for all the advice guys, real helpful!

 

[kwchang007]

Yeah, I would've done that already if my opty had an unlocked clock multiplier. I used to overclock all the time that way back when that was the norm. Unfortunately, it doesn't, and so I guess I have to go the FSB route. Shouldn't be too hard I guess, but don't I need to ramp up my ram speeds to see any real benefit when overclocking FSB speeds? Right now they are running at DDR400 with super low latency settings.

Thanks in advance for all the advice guys, real helpful!

Not necessarily if you can get your speeds high while keeping reasonable latency, then yeah it'll help. But either very low latency or high speeds work. Anyways raising the fsb isn't that hard, I did on an old p3 and memory limited the overclock, the thing could only do 1:1...and it 100 mhz memory so it was overclocked out of the gate. (only overclocking ever.....my laptop doesn't have a pll supported by anything )

 

[KennyT772]

FSB overclocking is how you get the best performance. Head over to the AMD overclockers club and the guys there can really help ya get the most out of your system.

 

[Widjaja]

Yeah? I heard some people here say the 6000+ bottlenecked those cards, so I was getting concerned. But I guess it's all relative... As long as I can play Oblivion at max settings, I'll be happy (for now anyhow...)

I play it at max settings.
The only time it hitches is when the data is coming from the hard drive.
Pretty smooth otherwise.

My brother has a way better setup than mine 2.9GhzC2D, fastest DDR2 ram, 8800GTX and he gets stutters alot!
I'm unsure if it's the fact he's using Vista ultimate though.

I feel a bit sorry for him since I can tell he gets a bit cranky when he sees how Oblivion plays on my lower spec rig.

 

[R-T-B]

I play it at max settings.
The only time it hitches is when the data is coming from the hard drive.
Pretty smooth otherwise.

My brother has a way better setup than mine 2.9GhzC2D, fastest DDR2 ram, 8800GTX and he gets stutters alot!
I'm unsure if it's the fact he's using Vista ultimate though.

I feel a bit sorry for him since I can tell he gets a bit cranky when he sees how Oblivion plays on my lower spec rig.

Vista Ultimate really lowered my gaming performance as well, so I wouldn't be surprised...

Thanks everyone, I basically got the info I needed I think. Looks good, I have the cards ordered and am reading into FSB overclocking now.

 

[csallis]

Yeah? I heard some people here say the 6000+ bottlenecked those cards, so I was getting concerned. But I guess it's all relative... As long as I can play Oblivion at max settings, I'll be happy (for now anyhow...)

I can easily believe that as my core 2 e6300 bottlenecked my x1950xt really bad at stock speeds right up until I overclocked over 3ghz the bottleneck was really obvious giving me framerates as low as 24 in bf2. No with the same cpu overclocked at 3.2ghz under the same conditions I rarely drop below 70 in intense firefights.

A 2900xt is a lot faster than my card so its easy to imagine that most cpu's would bottleneck it until they are seriously overclocked.

 

[Ketxxx]

Even if you cant get anymore out of your CPU, maxing out your RAM and FSB will reduce any potential bottlenecking. I can officially say on my old AMD setup (Asus Crosshair, 3500+ @ 2.8GHz and PC8000 @ 1.15GHz) that even that was bottlenecking my 1950Pro a bit.