a bit of advice

[AJMCURSE]

Hi All,

I am looking for some advise on my gaming build to try and get a bit more performance without spending too much (nothing would be nice )

My setup is:

• Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-78LMT-USB3 (rev. 6.0)
• CPU - AMD FX 8320 (using AIO watercooler - MSI Dragon
• RAM - 16GB DDR3 Corsair Vengence RAM
• GPU - Palit Nvidia GTX 1060 Dual
• HDD1 - 120GB SSD - Sandisk SSD Plus
• HDD2 - 500GB WD Blue (Steam Library and games etc)
• PSU - 750w
• Case - Bitfenix Prodigy M

Now my idea was to perhaps overclock my CPU however:
(A) ive never overclocked a CPU,
(B) the water cooling unit already sounds like a henry hoover
(C) Ive read some things indicating overclocking on a 760G mobo is not "safe" ??

The only reason i am thinking about overclocking is that at times i feel like the CPU holds back / bottlenecks the 1060 graphics card (only in certain games) like Killing Floor 2.

I play Shadow of Mordor using V-SYNC at 50fps and it has NEVER dropped, WOW on ultra averaging 70FP. Metro(both games) on ultra never dropped low enough to notice lag.

As stated above i have noticed in some games (Killing Floor 2 as an example) the FPS will "clip" randomly below 30fps then sits around 50-60fps no issue... could this be game optimization or could my CPU in fact be bottle-necking the GPU ?

Any comments / pointed would be appreciated.

Thanks

AJMCURSE

[kalniel]

In short, overclocking CPU won't help.

CPU generally only bottlenecks when the GPU isn't, ie you'll already be looking at high FPS. If FPS is low then it's more likely the GPU is a bottleneck or it's just some other lack of optimisation in the game engine. Frame rate low spikes could be caused by software rather than hardware - check BIOS and drivers are up to date.

[Dashers]

The odd drop in framerates on a game is generally to do with the game and not the system. Sure a super-powerful system can make those drops less drastic, but it's not the fault of the system that the drops happen.

You can do various things to try and narrow-down bottlenecks on your system - having a second monitor is handy for this. Start with the Windows Task Manager, this simply gives you an overview of your CPU cores and how much they are being used. You can see if any of your cores are maxing out and how well games multi-thread.

Task Manager now also gives you useful read outs of your disk performance (if it's not there, you might need to look up how to enable disk counters), from this you can see how much activity is going on your disk and see if you're getting I/O issues. You have to use perfmon to really get into it, but it's a good start. Obviously disks don't give their maximum performance most of the time, so raw throughput isn't a massively useful number for identifying bottlenecks, activity and disk queues (perfmon) is a better sign of how much waiting is happening on your disk.

It goes without saying though, a game will load quicker off a SSD than a hard-disk. Games tend to be front-heavy on I/O; they load their content when the level loads and that's it. So fast disks don't necessarily impact game performance (but handy on multiplayer games where the first person in gets an advantage!).

Move onto products like MSI Afterburner which allow you to monitor the memory utilisation, bandwidth and GPU load on your graphics card. This is a really handy tool for trying to get the maximum life out of your card as you can easily see what graphics settings in games hog the resources.

You don't mention your version of Windows - love or hate the UI, Windows 10 is better performing than it's predecessors, likewise 8 is over 7. Ensure your system is up-to-date, up-to-date drivers for all devices not just your graphics card all help (usually). Anti-virus can sometimes be a pain with on-access-scanning, but most are intelligent enough these days not to re-scan something that has already been scanned.

[AJMCURSE]

You don't mention your version of Windows - love or hate the UI, Windows 10 is better performing than it's predecessors, likewise 8 is over 7.

Thanks for the responses guys , and i am running Windows 10 with current updates running

i tend to run most games "fullscreen - windowed" so i can tab out without waiting for the entire application to minimise / maximise.

Am i correct to think the game "should" run better "full screen" ?

Cheers

[Dashers]

Certainly used to be the case that fullscreen was better, but I've been using borderless a lot recently without any noticeable performance issues (but my computer is a bit beefier too).