What is bottlenecking my rig?

[sakage.shinga]

Hi guys,

My main gaming rig now has a few years under its belt, although it has received a few upgrades since it was first built. However, I have noticed that on some recent games (and I'm not even talking about cutting edge graphics here), the cutscenes & gameplay can suffer some minor framerate drops or slow cursor movement (e.g. mouse cursor in Witcher 2 moves a little slow, not laggy, but just slow). I'm not exactly sure what's bottlenecking my system, so I'd like to get some feedback from the people who have more experience & knowledge than I do.

Processor: i5-750 @ ~2.67GHz (possible bottleneck)
RAM: G. Skill Ripjaws 8GB (probably not here)
Main HDD: WD Caviar Black 2TB (could upgrade to SSD, but with OS + games I'd need around 800GB worth of space)
GPU: Asus Radeon HD 6970 DirectCU II 2GB (maybe running games at 1920x1200 is a bit too much to ask? Not sure).

Right now, upgrading HDD & GPU seem more doable than getting a new CPU, which I might do when I build a new rig in a year or so. But as it stands, would switching to a nVidia GPU help me out at all? I'm thinking about a GTX 660 or 670. However, if the GPU isn't what's bottlenecking my rig, than I might just wait a build a new rig altogether in about a year.

Thanks!!!

[dandelioneater]

1st thing you should do right off the bat would be to overclock your cpu. You should be able to do 4.0 Ghz fairly easily wih that chip. Then the next best thing in my opinion would be to get an ssd. You can still install your games on the hard drive and store files there. Make sure you have the latest video card drivers as well.

[sakage.shinga]

Thanks for the reply! But if I keep game installs on the old hard drive but moved OS onto an SSD, would I still get a boost in gaming performance?

[IRQ Conflict]

Try playing with mouse acceleration? What settings in the witcher are you using? Latest drivers from AMD? Try reinstalling the GPU drivers after removing them with Control Panel. Programs and Features. Then boot into safe mode, use Driver Sweeper to clean up any remnants. Boot back into normal windows and install new Catalyst.

And yes, that OC is rather weak. Try to shoot for 3.0-3.4Ghz at least.

Edit: Is the game on a 7500 RPM drive? If so, it should be fine. An SSD will help with load times but you are not swapping much if any with 8 GB's of system ram.

[sakage.shinga]

Hmm my normal driver update procedure ise this :
1)Uninstall using AMD's installer package.
2)reboot
3)clean registry with tuneup utilities.
4)install new driver.

I will try it your way. Thanks!

[IRQ Conflict]

For your convenience.

[sakage.shinga]

Originally Posted by IRQ Conflict

For your convenience.

Thanks!

[Dragonstongue]

6970 while a bit power hungry compared to current offerings is still a very good card provided you use the best drivers for it, I believe most used 12.4 12.6 and 12.8 for performance reasons, and 1920x1200 is perfect for it, not asking tons out of it, just using it efficently and also allowing the cpu to do its part in the process :)
for cpu overclocking usually 3.0Ghz 3.6Ghz and 4.0Ghz are your main sweet spots to gain the most performance and reduce bottlenecks.

Your cpu is dual channel vs the higher end X58 based that were tri-channel, so yes there could be a bneck here, but a very slight one at best and overclocking should help to mitigate this as well.
Having an SSD as an OS drive and the 2tb as a game drive is a very good thing, and should help overall performance, make tasks and background a little snappier, could help the game overall as well during load times and such, just make sure paging files are set per drive and large enough according to the size of installed ram. It may not give you a frame rate boost, but it does help overall smoothness in most everything(I have found)