OMG bought a I7 2600k Results Battlefield 3!!!

i must say adding a 3rd 5870 really helps ALOT,

 

Make sure you have the latest punkbuster installed,
Open ports on your router,
run a speedtest.net and a pingtest.net
unable to run pingtest.net ? try opening ports/DMZ

I have no connection issues at all, as long as the server is top quality my connection is great (100meg internet)

 

Hi guys, I would need your help. My specs are: Sapphire 6950 Toxic 2GB which I bought just recently running on intel core 2 quad Q9450, currently 3,2 Ghz on 1,26 Volt. With the release of Back to Karkand map pack my fps dropped rapidly in average of 15 FPS less. On 32 players vanilla maps my fps was at minimum 41(caspian), average 55-60 fps, of course in tight areas of maps shooting over 80 - 90 fps. Now I am aware that I have a decent gpu, but obviously my Q9450 can't feed the hell out of my 6950 toxic. My RAM: 4GB kingston hyperx 800Mhz.

Now I stand against huge dilema. To buy i7 2600k 3,4 Ghz which would also come with new MOBO due to the fact that Q9450's socket 775 is way too old fashioned. Or try to clock my Q9450 even more! Although I am worried, because at the moment the temperature on first core is around 62°C whilst the rest of the 3 cores run on 50°C. If I add more juice to the CPU I feel I won't be able to cool it properly. I use scythe mugen cooler.

Any thoughts?

 

You didn't mentioned the settings you play at. Don't know how much it will be for you since it's DDR2 we're speaking but I would strongly recommend getting 8GB RAM. Trust me, this game needs more than 4, I've felt it myself. As for the CPU it should just fine, check your GPU usage, if it's 99% then there's no bottleneck with your quad.

 

You'r best bet right now is to overclock the mofo but not sure how far the 9450's go?

I had my old Q9650 at 4.25 on a Scythe Ninja which is almost the same as the Mugen. It ran at 1.6v with uprates Fans in a push pull configuration. Loud bit it kept the chip cool no problem even at 1.6v which is pushing it to say the least.. But it ran for 3 years. I wouldn't advise you to pump that much volts though as it is risky unless you get lucky with a chip like I did. 1.45 would be ok however.

But if you can muster the cash upgrading would help for sure. BF3 was the game that made me get rid of the old q9650 rig as even at 4.25ghz it was starting to struggle in bf3. It wouldn't go below 40fps at that speed though.

Have the CPU usage monitor running while gaming and alt tab when you are getting crap FPS and check the % over the last 30 seconds. I'm pretty sure it would be 95-100% on all cores like my old q9650 was.

 

Many thanks for your response. I play on all high,1680x1050 res, anti aliasing off, deferred AA off, motion blur off, HBAO off. The thing is that even if I turn on all AA and HBAO it makes literally no difference on my frame rate. Therefore I suspect that my CPU is the reason of my "low" frame rate.

I am one of those players who consider 40 fps way too low for a joyful experience out of games like BF3. I need to check the usage of my gpu when I get back home from work and let you know. I knew that 4 Gigs of RAM might also be the problem. Although the price for DDR2 RAM these days is crazy, not to mention that I would need additional active cooler for those hyper X's as they are heating like crazy. That would also mean that I would have to change my CPU cooler as there won't be enough room for my Scythe. This is like a chain of things that influence each other. That is why I am wondering what would be the best solution, to buy or not to buy new rig.

 

try turning mesh to medium

 

can you not overclock that cpu to ~4ghz? that should help alot

 

Doubtfull it would need a 500 fsb.

 

wel to be honest i think about the mobo more then cpu

many buy cheap mobos, good cpus and gpus, but actualy its the motherboard connecting all these parts together. asus is basicly the good stuff when it comes to this

 

---remove---- :banana:

 

So I have some quite amazing results here. I have managed to clock the CPU on 3,6 Gigs on 1,4V. When I ran prime95, the maximum temperature on the frst core (after first hour of torture test) was around 67°C the rest around 58°C. I got rid of the old paste and used liquid metal one which really helped a lot to get lower temperatures.

I ran the battlefield and could notice a significant improvement on minimum fps. At the moment it goes very rarely below 50. Tested it on Gulf of oman 64players. Again 1680x1050, all high, HBAO off, Anisotropic f. 16x, motion blur off, mesh low. What I also had to do was to decrease the timings on my RAMs in order to get stable performance. Not sure, but I guess my mobo doesn't like hyperX timmings.

As far as I know he Volt ceiling on Q9450 according to official statement from intel is 1,40V. Unfortunately my hyberX's are 800Mhz and therefore 3,6 Gig on my CPU is max what I could juice out of my Q9450.

Again while running battlefield 3 on Gulf of Oman also Caspian border, CPU was running on 83% while GPU between 70 - 75% which is amazing !!!

After all my all grand daddy Q9450 is not that worthless

 

I know people like to OC, but what is the point when you already have good, well perfect performance. I think he should leave it alone, before something get's damage something.

 

Aw cmon dont be afraid my friend

 

because it is a free upgrade. I have profiles in my bios from 4.7ghz to 5.2ghz for benching. the stock clock is 3.4ghz. if you are experienced and do it right the risks are minimal. if you jack up at the voltages and do not monitor temps well thats a recipe for disaster

 

another thinG you can try is the console command

render.perfoverlayvisible 1

as detailed in this article here.

http://forums.electronicarts.co.uk/battlefield-3-pc/1445046-bf3-performance-graph-pure-goodness.html

if you see a yellow horizontal line seperate from the green horizontal line that means there is a cpu or gpu bottleneck.

"So if your CPU is BELOW your GPU then your GPU is the problem/bottleneck etc.
GREEN (GPU) BELOW YELLOW (CPU) = CPU is slower"


BF3 has some cool tools for analysis !

 

Thx, I will definitely check that out.

 

Wow, this thread is something. I think we can all agree that BF3 does benefit from better per core performance as well as more cores period with regards to minimums and averages, and that a Phenom 2/C2Q absolutely will bottleneck a high end crossfire/SLI setup. That's pretty obvious. However, they will play just fine for most with a single GPU.