I've been OC'ing my system and managed to get it to 4GHz on air cooling. However, my BMS framerates average at 41fps (see this thread) while my GPU usage is about 50% and utilizes less than half of my GPU RAM. A poster on the BMS forums claimed that it is my old CPU/motherboard that is now the bottleneck.

Is this true? Is a 4.0GHz on an i5 750 and P55 motherboard going to be slower than 4.0GHz on an i5 4670K and a Z87 motherboard?

A quick look at my favorite online seller shows an i5 4670K at £168 and Z87 motherboards starting at £77. For less than £250, this is really tempting me, but after buying 3 new screens, well, my credit card is currently finding new places to hide around the house. Maybe I should just cut it up and be done with this.

HELP!!

Save some money and go the i7 route. I think my old i7 920 OC'd to 3.5Ghz does a better job at BMS than your i5 @ 4.0Ghz.

The i7 4770K is £239, almost the cost of the i5 **AND** the motherboard.

Have you checked CPU usage in task manager? Easy to keep an eye on it in-game with another monitor.

Chances are it won't show anywhere near 100% because it won't be using all four cores, but even if you see only one core is maxed out that would indicate the CPU is the limiting factor. Make sure it's set to view 'One Graph Per CPU' under the view menu.

Am pretty confident the new i5 would be a significant upgrade if it is a CPU issue.

LOL... I got a bit excited there. Did a test and FRAPS showed an average of 65.5fps but then I realized I did not use Helios so I can watch the Resource Monitor.

Anyway, total CPU usage was about 45-50% with CPU 0 around 50%, 1 around 70% with spikes to 80-90%, 2 around 40% and 3 was about 50%. None of them were 90% and even if they were, it would only be one second or so. GPU usage for this test was around 61-64%, memory usage at 1247MB. Temps were 56/55/53/55 on my cores, max. Is there a program that can record/display min/max CPU usage?

Perhaps, but so what? You want to remove the bottleneck, don't you?

Well, firstly, I'm not sure the CPU is the bottleneck. Like I said, none of my cores hover at 80%. I presume when someone says "maxxing the core," that means 90% or 100% core usage, right? If so, then none of my cores are at max.

Second, I have no way of knowing how much performance a new CPU + Mobo will give me. Sure, there are reviews, but gains on one game does not necessarily translate to the same gains on another game. I'm sure if there are differences in performance in Crysis and Skyrim, there will be a difference in performance in BMS as well. How much more FPS will a new CPU + Mobo give me? 5-10fps doesn't sound too good if I'm spending £300 or more likely £450 (4770K, Asus Z87 Pro, Corsair H100i water cooler), but if that'll give me 20fps more (stable 60fps in my testing), then I would be happy.

That's not how it works Ice. A bottleneck is not indicated by 100% usage, there's so many more factors included. You will rarely to never see that much utilization today. A majority of games and applications today are multi-threaded to some extend, which means more than one thread shares a workload. However due to the unique way multi-threading works, it's impossible to see full utilization.

Say two threads are working on a game, one doing most of the calculations whilst the second is doing physics based calculations. The game relies on information from both Core 1 and 2 which is then joined together. So while Core 1 is busy calculating everything, it asks Core 2 to do a physics calculation. Core 2 does the calculation and hands it back.

So Core 2 might be sitting at 40% because it's constantly waiting for instructions which it then passes os. Core 1 will never see 100% because it will have to wait for the calculations from Core 2 and join them together at the right time - Meaning it will never reach full utilization.

The more cores a game uses, the more evened out the utilization will be and less usage across the board.

So what you want is a better CPU, as newer CPUs are more effective per core. So it does a better, faster job at doing the calculations, meaning faster hand-offs etc.

However it's impossible to say what kind of gains you will see, completely impossible and there's no point in doing cross-game comparisons as it's completely irrelevant.

Upgrading can be a gamble, especially if done primarily for one game.

Okay, while I understand what you are saying, then how is "CPU bottleneck" determined? If Core 1 is waiting for Core 2 and vice versa and thus never gets maxxed out, then how can you tell that the CPU is the bottleneck and not something else (one user on another forum suggest bus as the limiting factor)?

By doing what you've been doing; Overclocking. Upping the Mhz makes the processor work faster and will ease up on any potential CPU bottlenecks. So if that gives you some noticeable gains, you are CPU bottlenecked.

I feel like we're going back to the discussion on the other thread, so let me bring this back on track....



I think I mentioned on another thread that to claim this is true is like saying an old car doing 40miles per gallon covers less distance than a newer car doing 40miles per gallon....

I think I'm very lucky that it's a holiday weekend otherwise I'd be frantically reading reviews and would likely order tonight. But since any orders today would not arrive until Tuesday, I'm in no rush to pull the trigger, to the great relief of my credit card.