# Phenom II X4 955 OC 3.8GHz-4.0GHz Bottleneck question



## Winudertas (Nov 30, 2015)

Hi everyone. I've posted my system specs below. I'm playing mostly with my Xbox One, but I like to play shooters like CoD: Black Ops III, Star Wars: Battlefront and Rainbow Six Siege online with PC. I have pretty decent laptop with i7-4710HQ and GTX 860M. In any case, I have gaming keyboard and for holiday season looking forward to buy gaming mouse too and play with my secondary desktop.

Where I'm going? I don't want to upgrade my all secondary system now. What I have now? I have SSD, enough RAM (yeah, it's DDR2), normal PSU, decent CPU cooler and case. I will play only at 1080p. I was looking for VGA, but I'm worried about my CPU. I can crank up X4 955 at 4.0 GHz easily, but it still will bottleneck - it's an old CPU. I'm thinking it's still four core CPU, 3.8-4.0 GHz is high enough. My choise? AMD Radeon R9 380. Real question: how much 3.8-4.0 Phenom II will bottleneck this VGA? If it's so-so, I will grab R9 380 and next year I will upgrade all system: CPU, mobo and RAM. Your suggestions please.

CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE OC - 3.8GHz-4.0GHz
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD3P
VGA: Gigabyte Radeon R7 250 (Only 3D/2D Movies) - I want to replace this VGA this week
RAM: 8GB DDR2
PSU: be quite! 700W 80Plus Gold
Storage: Adata Premier Pro SP610 256GB
OS: Windows 7


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## SonicZap (Nov 30, 2015)

I have a HD 7850 with the same CPU at 3.8 GHz (although I have DDR3 RAM), and a Radeon HD 7850. My experience has been that I get seriously CPU bottlenecked quite rarely, although it depends on the game. In Arma 3 I find myself CPU bottlenecked often when there's a lot of AI around, but in for example The Witcher 3 I didn't notice a bottleneck at all.

Now, the R9 380 is ~50% faster (IIRC) than the HD 7850, and you have DDR2 RAM, meaning that you'll be bottlenecked more. However, the R9 380 will still be a *huge* improvement over that R7 250 and it'll likely give satisfying performance (better than your laptop), so I'd say go for it. If you aren't satisfied with the performance after the upgrade and you see a CPU bottleneck, you'll be able to upgrade the rest of the system next year.


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## siluro818 (Nov 30, 2015)

Get the R380 (do consider the new R380X option, unlike most AMD Xs this one seems to have a positive price/performance ratio) - there's simply no reason not to do this and if you encounter issues after the fact you can always upgrade further. Gotta say though, I've been running an X6 Phenom II and I'm yet to encounter any bottlenecks except for really CPU-heavy situations like towns in FFXIV with lots of players, or some unoptimized locations in Fallout 4. Everything else runs like a charm and I'm feeding a R9 390 at that


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## Jetster (Nov 30, 2015)

Your going to lose some performance but not much. It depends on the game. Any new card will lose performance on older CPUs. That's just the way it is.


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## Winudertas (Dec 1, 2015)

Hello everyone once again. Thank you very much for your suggestions. I will look for R9 380 and R9 380X reviews and I will buy this card today/tomorrow. If my favorite games will work well with Phenom II X4 955 4.0 GHz, I will upgrade my system only after 6 months. If not, I will try to upgrade in coming months.


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## neatfeatguy (Dec 1, 2015)

You'll certainly see a performance gain going from a low-end GPU to something more high-end, but the CPU will hold you back.

I ran a Phenom II x4 940 at 3.6 and 2 GTX 570s in SLI. I got good performance out of the system, but the CPU was really holding back the GPUs. I benched a few games at the time on my Phenom II 940 @ 3.6GHz and then again with my i5-4670K. The graphs show 4 data points:
Light Purple = PII @ 3.6 with 1 GTX 570 @ stock
Dark Purple = PII @ 3.6 with 1 GTX 570 OC'ed from 732/1900 to 890/2050
Yellow = PII @ 3.6 with 2 GTX 570s in SLI @ stock
Light Blue = i5-4670K @ stock with 2 GTX 570s in SLI @ stock

















Metro 2033 in SLI - benchmark tool had very high and low spikes with SLI enabled. This is why the Max FPS is so high and the Min FPS are so low. The game ran well with SLI, just the benchmarks look a bit off because of it.

As you can see, I got a large performance increase going from my 20% overclocked Phenom II x4 940 to a stock i5-4670K. In the end, you'll get decent performance with the OC'ed Phenom II, but it will be holding the system back some.


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## cdawall (Dec 1, 2015)

That Phenom II is about as fast as an athlon 5350. So you could easily just throw it away and go to a pentium G3528, inexpensive board with the ability to overclock and absolutely blow it out of the water.

But if you are keeping it, it will work and it will bottleneck some. Less with a single GPU than dual.


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## GoldenX (Dec 1, 2015)

cdawall said:


> That Phenom II is about as fast as an athlon 5350. So you could easily just throw it away and go to a pentium G3528, inexpensive board with the ability to overclock and absolutely blow it out of the water.
> 
> But if you are keeping it, it will work and it will bottleneck some. Less with a single GPU than dual.



Dude, how can an arch better than Bulldozer running over 3GHz be worse than a 2 module APU (4 ALU, 2FPU) running at 2GHz.
The Phenom II are old, yes, but not as exagerated as you make it. I can't upgrade my Phenom II just because a hexa-core FX6300 is not better, and an i5 k is too expensive.


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## cdawall (Dec 1, 2015)

GoldenX said:


> Dude, how can an arch better than Bulldozer running over 3GHz be worse than a 2 module APU (4 ALU, 2FPU) running at 2GHz.
> The Phenom II are old, yes, but not as exagerated as you make it.



I'm not exaggerating I have both. The jaguar cores are not 2 module APU's they are not based on bulldozer in any way shape form of function.


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## GoldenX (Dec 1, 2015)

Me too, I've build and tested 5350s and they are at half the performance of my 980. They are a lot more eficient, but never better.


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## cdawall (Dec 1, 2015)

GoldenX said:


> Me too, I've build and tested 5350s and they are at half the performance of my 980. They are a lot more eficient, but never better.



Tested in what? In multithreading they literally embarrass the Phenom II's, In IPC they are coming up on twice as efficient per clock. Mine's clocked at a clean cool 2.4ghz and blows the 4ghz Phenom II 965BE away while using about a third of the power.

The only thing that would bottleneck them in games is the pci-e 4.0 slot, but its a 3.0 so in theory if used with a matching 3.0 video card it will have the same bandwidth as his current boards pci-e 1.0 x16 slot.


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## GoldenX (Dec 1, 2015)

We are going ooff topic, YES they are very efficient (25w vs 125/140w), but never near their performance:






http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_athlon_5350_apu_and_am1_platform_review,13.html

Back on topic, as said, just get the GPU, if the CPU bothers you, you can upgrade later.


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## cdawall (Dec 1, 2015)

Did you seriously use one benchmark to try and prove a performance increase?

2.4ghz 5350






2ghz Phenom II (mobile) (I chose this because it's roughly HALF the performance per clock)






4ghz Phenom II X6 (better IPC than the X4's)






Notice any trends? Specifically in the IPC department? Mind you these are all the 1.73 benchmark. I need to rerun 1.74 to see it against some others. These are not the weak little cores everyone makes them out to be. Clock for clock it beats Phenom II as a whole, Multicore it widens the gap even more. Photo's are pulled from the CPUZ thread if you wish for more examples.


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## GoldenX (Dec 1, 2015)

Yeah point taken, I've tested mine at 2400MHz in CPU-Z 1.73, it gets 352 single thread, 1017 multi thread. Would love to see some numbers in 1.74, please post them to the CPU-Z thread, the difference is too big between the 2 scores on mine.
It's better clock for clock and in eficiency, but not on raw performance, look at the review I've posted, my point is still valid, at it's stock 2,05GHz it has half the performance of a 3,7GHz Phenom II, or even less.
And I think no one would buy a 5350 or J1900 and add a 380X, better IPC or not.


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## cdawall (Dec 1, 2015)

GoldenX said:


> Yeah point taken, I've tested mine at 2400MHz in CPU-Z 1.73, it gets 352 single thread, 1017 multi thread. Would love to see some numbers in 1.74, please post them to the CPU-Z thread, the difference is too big between the 2 scores on mine.
> It's better clock for clock and in eficiency, but not on raw performance, look at the review I've posted, my point is still valid, at it's stock 2,05GHz it has half the performance of a 3,7GHz Phenom II, or even less.
> And I think no one would buy a 5350 or J1900 and add a 380X, better IPC or not.



I am waiting on my board to come back from RMA. Someone got a little excited with the overclocking.


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## vega22 (Dec 1, 2015)

should we go back to taking about the core the dude in the op has and not what we have?

i mean kaspian and kabini are great for what they are, but both are low power chips compared to deneb 

all cpu hold gpu back to some degree. even a skylake system would hold a gpu back when compared to a faster skylake chip.

you would get better fps from a more powerful gpu and that gpu would get better fps from a more powerful cpu. circle of life.


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## GoldenX (Dec 1, 2015)

Too bad the best option is so expensive.
I think that except some weird cases, he should get over 60 fps with his 955.


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## cdawall (Dec 1, 2015)

GoldenX said:


> Too bad the best option is so expensive.
> I think that except some weird cases, he should get over 60 fps with his 955.



As long as the GPU can push it there is no reason the CPU cannot match it.



marsey99 said:


> should we go back to taking about the core the dude in the op has and not what we have?
> 
> i mean kaspian and kabini are great for what they are, but both are low power chips compared to deneb
> 
> ...



But we both have both lol


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