does my cpu bottleneck my gpu?

[thermobaric]

Hi,

I bought a 7950 3 days ago. I love this thing, but something doesn't seem right..

I've been playing the game 'hawken' for some time now. Pretty nice graphics, and my machine hasn't realy that much troubles with running it on ultra.

The problem are the FPS drops. Sometimes i get drops to 35 FPS, which is annoying in a fast pace shooter. I've been looking at GPU activity and FPS in-game, and i don't understand why i would have fps drops if my card is only used for 30 - 40%. My CPU is used for 80 - 95 % on 1 core, and 50 - 70 % on the other 3 cores.

Stats:

Radeon HD 7950 XFX

FX-4170 overclocked from 4.1 to 4.7

Asrock Extreme3

1330 MHz 8GB RAM

If my cpu is bottlenecking my GPU, would it be a wise idea to buy a FX-8350? is an 8 core realy worth the price? Or are the fps drops just because hawken is in open beta?

Thx for reading

[6677]

Wrong forum

[KasperVld]

Moved to off-topic.

@6677 - please use the report function on a post if you think it requires staff attention.

[thermobaric]

didn't i post it in off topic? oh sorry, i'll look better where i post next time

[Leonov]

I dont think you need to go all the way up to an 8350, That may create a new bottleneck. An FX-6300 should do that card good.

The Zambezi Architecture that the 4170 gives performance comparible to a Phenom II no matter how far you OC it. Anything in the Vishera archetecture will be have a sizeable increase in performance. In my opinion i would not go all out on an FX-8350 and just get a FX-6300. they are reasonable in price and should do well for your setup. Yout ram is also at a slow clock speed which cant be helping to situation. Get a FX-6300 and spend the difference on some faster ram, it should work out the bottlenecks.