16 replies to this topic

[Kaptain]

Just curious if anyone is running a core2 quad in the 3.5ghz range with a high end video card like a gtx770 or gtx780? What is your performance is like?

Edited by Kaptain, 19 February 2014 - 02:03 PM.

[Slab Squathrust]

Yeah I was running a core 2 quad extreme overclocked a bit under 3.5 ghz a few months ago. My gpu was a MSI 7970 lightning. Most of the time I was getting around 50 fps regardless of medium to high settings. I upgraded to an i7 2600k and im 50+ at very high settings in combat, 60+ all other times at stock speeds with the same gpu.

[RiceyFighter]

That processor is a complete bottleneck over that video card. Upgrade either an FX 6300 or Intel i5 3570k or I5 4570k.

[Goose]

Poke around these-here forums for tweaks, then get back to us: No one is shore what the results would be, but it'd be real handy if someone would do some reporting on the subject, seein' as lines of text in a user.cfg costs much less then a whole new system …

[Monkeystador]

Actually i think its not so much the CPU as the RAM on these old c2quad boxes. I still own a q8400 and its running at 3.2 ghz. The only thing that brought me frames is more RAM speed (now at 1000mhz up). I tested that individually from overclocking the RAM on itself and leaving the CPU at 2.66 ghz.
So in the end the system itself is a bottleneck as there is not enough speed on the ram bus. I get a never system now with 3.5 times as much bandwith and half the latency on the RAM. That should finally help to max out my GPU.

Edited by Monkeystador, 13 March 2014 - 04:01 AM.

[CeeKay Boques]

I'm running a Q9560 at 3.5 with a 4850x2 (1600x1200) and can get in the high 90s. I also ran it with with a 7850 before moving I to my new system, and also got in the high 90s. Good chip, those old QUADS.

So, a Video card of that quality is wasted.

[Monkeystador]

@Technoviking
Whats your RAM Bus speed at? And what are you settings? I mean i run on 1600x1200 all on high.
BTW... there is no Q9560 ... any saying high 90 is not meaning much. You got to get an average of the FPS too and a low FPS value it dips to when running into heated battles.
You need an fps recorder tool

Edited by Monkeystador, 11 March 2014 - 11:56 PM.

[Mad Porthos]

I'm not Technoviking, but likely he means QX9650, a 3ghz quad core LGA 775 chip. I run that myself and regretably, in functioning SLI still do not get near 90 steady... though it can get near there. With an overclock around 3.6 and ddr2 running at 800mhz (used to run 4gb of 1066mhz [pc-8500] but can't get new memory after it failed, so running 8gb of the normal speed stuff), the game is playable for the most part for me, at 1920x1080, medium settings. Unfortunately the recent patch for dx11 caused many more slowdowns into the "red" fps rates for me, whether I am in Dx11 or Dx9. I too am finally considering the upgrade, or just quitting playing MWO, since the rig I have right now far and away can still run every other game, bf4 included, flawlessly, but MWO just seems to be getting worse and worse as time goes on.

I have trouble buying a new rig when only this singular game is taxing the system's abilties. To me, it seems the fault lies more with sloppy unoptimized code, when other developers can use the same engine for complex games and have far superior performance.

Incidentally, the graphics cards are two zotac 660ti, in sli mode using the workarounds (enabling the various SLI profiles for other games in terms of rendering modes etc., done through nvidia inspector). Fps when not limited to 60 goes high as 110-120, but in game drops into 70-90 range and then in heavy combat often shudders down into the 30-40 range...

...infuriating part of it is that for no obvious reason, at times it drops into the 20's and teens on maps that three drops earlier, it ran in combat at 50+fps. The complexity of what is being rendered on screen rarely accounts for it, most often it's one of those things where if you "look at your team" things slow down, even though there are like 8 buildings and a hill in the way. Yet on a different drop, you can be literally looking at all 12 of the enemy murderballing, plus half your team trying to crack the murderball with Airstrikes and Artillery, with no real slowdown at all, everything being rendered at 50-70fps. And alternate vision modes, urgh... sometime they are fine, no huge performance hit...other times, they half the fps, till you turn em off and you get normal fps but are of course, blind on river city night etc.

Edited by Mad Porthos, 12 March 2014 - 05:28 AM.

[Kaptain]

Mad Porthos, I am in the same boat. They system I have runs everything fine aside from MWO. I really can't justify upgrading my system for one game.

Monkeystador, any update? I'm curious to play around with my ram and see if I notice any difference.

[Goose]

Annnnd a graph of y'alls' CPU load(s) would look like?

[Monkeystador]

Kaptain, on 12 March 2014 - 06:17 AM, said:

Mad Porthos, I am in the same boat. They system I have runs everything fine aside from MWO. I really can't justify upgrading my system for one game.

Monkeystador, any update? I'm curious to play around with my ram and see if I notice any difference.

There was a mistake in my previous post, chaning the meaning. I do run my ram 25% faster (800->1000) and it is well noticably.
The new parts will arrive in the next few days so i can l report on the upgraded system by the end of the weekend.

Regarding the QX9650 . I can imaging that one being much more performant than my Q8400. It does have 0.4ghz more baseclock and three times the CPU cache. That Cache does help to reduce the load on the RAM.

Goose, on 12 March 2014 - 02:54 PM, said:

Annnnd a graph of y'alls' CPU load(s) would look like?

ill do some screeners in the coming days. I can say that though, it is not fully utilised

Edited by Monkeystador, 13 March 2014 - 04:08 AM.

[Monkeystador]

Finally i got my new system. The faster RAM and CPU manage to nearly load up my GPU. In some situation the game still does not use 100% of it but in close combat it does.
GPU is a GTX 750 ti.
Resultion is 1600x1200 and all settings on HIGH.

Anyone know a tool to record the framerate and create a graph?
MSI Afterburner can do that.

Now i get acceptable framerates. 42 was the lowest dip in close combat with 2 mechs.

CPU and RAM are stock . 3.4/1600Mhz

Edited by Monkeystador, 15 March 2014 - 08:29 AM.

[Monkeystador]

Here are some graphs:

http://imgur.com/a/oPh95

[Straylight]

Heh, I think I win this thread for most-prehistoric CPU...

Q6600 overclocked to 3.2ghz on a 780i, 8gb 800mhz RAM, but with a GTX 760 at 1680x1050. I've never quite been able to justify upgrading thanks to how absolutely rock-solid the Q6600 is no matter what I throw at it. I've pushed the clock higher, but my heatsink can't keep up at that point.

It's playable at low-mid settings; 20-25 fps mostly, with momentary dips to 10ish. However, take away the CPU load that playing online inflicts and the story changes... it'll run a solid 80 fps in the testing grounds.

The overclock didn't get me much framerate improvement, but it did make the framerate more consistent. Doubling the RAM had no effect. I tried pushing the bus speed up, but the RAM really didn't like that.

I've never seen MWO get above 85% CPU usage, though, and it doesn't utilize the cores evenly.

[Kaptain]

Getting a free QX9650 here in the next few weeks. It has a VID of 1.235 vs my q6700s 1.325. The extreme is currently running at 3.8 on a Zalman so I believe I will be able to hit 4ghz on it with my a70.

The q6700 @ 3.6 gets about the same PC Mark CPU Score as the Extreme at Stock clocks:
I will let you guys know how the extreme clocks, scores and most importantly what it does for my FPS in MWO.

I have thought about buying a new board/cpu and some ddr3 but its just too much money for 1 GAME. Everything else I have tried plays great on this old system with the exception of MWO. In the past MWO played great also but every patch since the 12 man update has killed performance.

Anyways, that's the update

EDIT: after doing some research the extreme at 4ghz should break 6k for the PC Mark CPU score which would be an improvement of %50 over the q6700 that I normally run a 3200mhz... Curious as to what that translates to in-game...

Edited by Kaptain, 20 March 2014 - 12:35 AM.

[Monkeystador]

Straylight, on 19 March 2014 - 04:05 AM, said:

Heh, I think I win this thread for most-prehistoric CPU...

Q6600 overclocked to 3.2ghz on a 780i, 8gb 800mhz RAM, but with a GTX 760 at 1680x1050. I've never quite been able to justify upgrading thanks to how absolutely rock-solid the Q6600 is no matter what I throw at it. I've pushed the clock higher, but my heatsink can't keep up at that point.

It's playable at low-mid settings; 20-25 fps mostly, with momentary dips to 10ish. However, take away the CPU load that playing online inflicts and the story changes... it'll run a solid 80 fps in the testing grounds.

The overclock didn't get me much framerate improvement, but it did make the framerate more consistent. Doubling the RAM had no effect. I tried pushing the bus speed up, but the RAM really didn't like that.

I've never seen MWO get above 85% CPU usage, though, and it doesn't utilize the cores evenly.

You have to look at your GPU usage. If its not 100% all the time your system cannot feed enough to the GPU. Thats where your dips come from i bet.

[Mad Porthos]

As above poster, I really think the issue is coming down to ram speeds at this point, as the motherboard I use is also an evga 780i, similar to Straylight. I have the same issue with upgrading for one game, but beyond that I also have seen better performance out of this game when I had faster memory. Previously I had 4gb of pc-8500 (1066mhz), but when one stick failed, All I could quickly locate was ddr2 pc-6400(800mhz). It really does not take kindly to overclocking, no matter what voltages and timings I have tried, since the SPD settings just don't support the 1066mhz setting, no matter the quality of the memory. Though its 8gb of pc-6400(800mhz), 4gb of pc-8500 fast stuff (1066mhz) gave consistently better fps, far more stably. I also had some very high performance ddr2-1200, pc-9600. Unfortunately I only have 2GB of that, two 1GB sticks. Slipped that in and it works, and FPS are sometimes even better, but it's still choppy, at this point I suspect simply because 2GB is not enough really to run MWO well. Regrettably, it seems prohibitively expensive to obtain fast ddr2 now, the old ddr2-1200 stuff can't be found, and even the ddr2-1066 is expensive or hard to find in quantity to fill up 8gb on that 780i SLI board.

Why don't I just upgrade to a modern machine? I dunno. Probably stubborn and this thing STILL runs everything else beautifully, even Battlefield 4, also on Cryengine 3. Sob. Wimper. Grumble.

Edited by Mad Porthos, 21 March 2014 - 10:38 PM.