Personal Rig - CPU Bottleneck when Gaming

[AstinTeeb]

Hello,

So I'm more or less new to the PC Gaming thing. I've never been a huge gamer (PC, console, or otherwise) but recently been keen to dive in a little more. Assassins Creed on the PS3 or Skyrim, SWTOR, and occasisoally WOW on the PC have seen me through the last decade or so but I want to expand my horizons. I have a reasonably powerful (if outdated...) workstation which has never had a problem running Skyrim, SWTOR, or WOW, but over the weekend I attempted to run both Minecraft and GTA IV (OK, I'm a bit behind the times but these are new to me haha) and in both cases I was hitting 100% CPU almost immediately which is then giving very jumpy performance to a more or less unplayable extent. I've tried reducing graphics settings, particularly in GTA IV anything that specifically mentions an impact on the CPU(s), but I'm still not really getting anywhere... I'm really just wondering if this seems right, are these games really so CPU intensive? Or is there maybe a problem somewhere with either my hardware of software config? I've put my specs below:

• 2x Quad Core AMD Opteron 2360 @ 2.6GHz
• 16GB DDR2 ECC RAM (8x 2GB Sticks)
• NVIDIA Quadro FX4800
• (CPU's using a proprietry AIO Liquid Cooler for the case)
• Running Windows 10 Pro (x64) on a 1TB HDD with 600GB Free (using another 3 HDD's for music, pictures, etc)

I know it's not the newest setup, and paricularly the Opterons aren't exactly optimised for gaming (or very fast) but I was surprised by how bad the performance was. Is it possible that the games aren't able to utilise both CPUs? Or is the setup really just too outdated to keep up ?

Thanks in advance! I've done a lot of custom builds over the years (never for myself because you know, budget...) but always for video editing, or sound production environments. I don't have much experience in the realm of gaming rigs so any advice would be very much appreciated.

Thanks,

Matt

 

[varkanoid]

Your hardware is too old and not designed for games. You would be better off scrapping the lot and starting fresh, with the HDD.

 

[Chestnutphantom]

Considering the fact that most games don't use more than 4 cores (newer ones have started to use more cores) and those Opterons have terrible IPC because of how old they are. Also considering that your playing GTA IV which is a super badly optimised game and your graphics card doesn't even have support DX 11. You need to seriously upgrade, if you are to expect any decent performance out of you're system.

 

[Jace007]

Opteron is a Server Chip was'nt really made for gaming & Nvidia Quadro card are more for 3d rendering programs rather than gaming. The best thing you can do is borrow a friends Graphics card and see if it makes a difference if not you have your answer, your system is Way too old & its time to upgrade. Hope that helps.

 

[nox_uk]

I know it's not the newest setup, and paricularly the Opterons aren't exactly optimised for gaming (or very fast)

erm, tell that to DFI when the Opterons came out originally. They may of not been designed for gaming, but they were the best gaming CPU's out there at the time - overclocking higher than their desktop counterparts.

Thing to remember is there will always be a bottleneck somewhere. I would follow Jace007's advice and borrow a GPU to try out. You will probably find it's something like your CPU's are trying to compensate for lack of DX11 support and because they are old and relatively slow they can't without impacting the games.

 

[pastymuncher]

Hi and welcome to the forums.

Those opterons must be 9-10 years old now and will be hopelessly outclassed by a modern cpu. The Quadro is a similar story and is not a gaming gpu anyway. That would be hammered by even a low end modern gpu in games. I agree with varkanoid and think you would be best off starting from scratch rather than spending money on such a old pc. Even if you bought a modern gpu those cpu's are going to hold it back and if you are already seeing 100% cpu usage it would just be a waste of money.