help me find my bottle neck!

**DOMINATOR** · 03-07-14, 11:12 AM

so i have an old PC but dont want to spend a lot of money buying a new rig.

recently upgraded from 8800gts to gtx750ti
mobo - maximus formula
cpu - Q6600 quad core
ram - gskill 4mb 800mhz

now i was hoping for an increase in fps on higher settings but i found slim to none increase in fps/performance with the new card.
so i ask what could i do for an increase in pretty graphics?

mostly play tf2, throw in some csgo, civ5, insurgency.

i have never but wouldnt be opposed to overclocking as my system runs very good temps.

**WileECyte** · 03-07-14, 11:20 AM

Your CPU is going to be your bottleneck. The Q6600 is pretty long in the tooth at this point. Overclocking would likely help some... but your best bet is to replace it at this point.

**HeavyG** · 03-07-14, 11:44 AM

From my experiences with the Q6600, you will find yourself to be bottlenecked with most demanding games unless you overclock. There is one way to test if you are being bottlenecked:

Overclock your CPU by X%. If you see your FPS increase by that same X% (or close to it), then you certainly have a CPU bottleneck issue. If you overclock and don't see similar margins, then you likely don't have a CPU bottleneck.

My findings with Q6600 was that 3.4GHz was needed to avoid any bottlenecking when running Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3. And this was running two AMD 6950 cards in Crossfire. You may need to upgrade the CPU cooler before overclocking, but don't expect much improvement in games like BF3 and BF4 when running a stock Q6600. You will be disappointed with your upgrade.

Now don't get me wrong... you would see an improvement either way by going from the 8800GT to the 750ti, but at a certain point, you won't be leveraging the max performance out of your new card because your CPU is holding it back.

**DOMINATOR** · 03-07-14, 11:53 AM

thanks heavyg/wile. i do have aftermarket cpu cooler at idle i run 30-35c, underload ive never seen over 50c

time for some experimenting.

**WileECyte** · 03-07-14, 11:57 AM

Your board should be more than capable of overclocking.

You should have seen a huge jump in performance on Civ 5. Benchmarks from after it launched, showed that 9-13fps for 1080p gaming on high settings was expected out of a 9800GT... which means your 8800GT should have been somewhat slower. a 750Ti should be able to max out the framerate. Civ 5 uses V-Sync and locks your framerate to the refresh rate of your monitor.

**DOMINATOR** · 03-07-14, 01:47 PM

ok so OC to 3.6ghz and lowest my fps got was 60. averaging 80-110 (TF2) before the OC and card i would drop to 15fps at times in tf2.
max temp recorded after playing an hour was 54c

pretty damn happy! shoulda overclocked long ago.

**HeavyG** · 03-07-14, 01:51 PM

Originally Posted by DOMINATOR

ok so OC to 3.6ghz and lowest my fps got was 60. averaging 80-110 (TF2) before the OC and card i would drop to 15fps at times in tf2.
max temp recorded after playing an hour was 54c

pretty damn happy! shoulda overclocked long ago.

Nice work! Overclocking is pretty easy nowdays. It was much more difficult in the 90s and early 2000s. The way I see it, you just achieved a 50% overclock from the 2.4GHz stock speeds of the Q6600. If you would have done this from the start, your "budget" Q6600 CPU would have been dominating even the more expensive extreme quad CPUs that were out at the time.

I always overclock... it is too easy to get more bang for your buck.