i5 8600k

Shlippery

(sorry about the vague thread title..was distracted while writing it )

Subject: i5 8600k Upgrade Suggestions


Howye,

Trying to think of my next reasonable upgrade and think the CPU needs a bump.

Currently have the following which is fine - https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/c7P7Zf

but feel my GPU is being bottlenecked by the the CPU.

Would it make more sense to switch to Ryzen, thus requiring a new mobo?

Or pickup an i7 8700k/9700k

https://pc-builds.com/calculator/Core_i5-8600K/GeForce_RTX_2080/0O012llu/8/


Trying to think what'd make the most sense, play a lot of Battlefield (Cpu intensive) , Photoshop use and expecting to push some VR as well.

Tropheus

I wouldn't have thought that CPU would be a significant bottleneck as it's relatively new. Have you overclocked it?

Homelander

I definitely wouldn't swap platform...you could maybe just keep an eye out for a good price 2nd hand 8700 or 9700K on adverts or similar for a general upgrade....

The 8600K shouldn't be really any much kind of a bottleneck in BFV even at 120hz+...are you actually having problems?

Tropheus

I would say that actual gains from a 8700 or 9700k would be minimal over a well overclocked 8600k.

Shlippery

No, not really facing problems ...just trying to squeeze bit more oomph in case it's holding back the 2080 in anyway. Feel BFV struggles more than it should considering my specs and figured the hyperthreading may improve things or at least let me maximise the potential!

Again, I could be daft and just itching get upgrading and tinkering with the PC again.


https://valid.x86.fr/1fkbxm

I presume you are OC'ing that 8600k? That was my last CPU and it overclocked like a champ.

Homelander

How exactly is bfv struggling?

K.O.Kiki

Wait for Ryzen 4000 desktop parts IMHO.
Or sell the CPU/mobo/cooler & fund a Ryzen 3700X/3900X now.

But if you're playing at 1440p or above, it shouldn't really matter right now.

Shlippery

Yea, it's playing at 1440p, but the framerates aren't as buttery smooth as I'd expect with a 2080 to be honest. Game seems to stutter unless I shut everything down. Assumed it was the CPU. Not as attached to Battlefield at the moment, so it's not the end of the world, but it was definitely the one game that made me think CPU could be holding it back a little!


As far as overclocking, I've just used the bog standard wizard in the bios. Maybe a bit of experimentation and playing around might improve things.


Trying to make the best of what I have and feel I missed a trick getting the 8600k originally!

Homelander

It's not the CPU. You can see here that you should be capable of avg of almost 150FPS, min almost 90FPS when you pair a 2080Ti with a 8600K. This is at 1080P ultra.

So with a 2080 Super at 1440P ultra, there are probably some scenes with tonnes of explosions or smoke (or both) which are utterly hammering your GPU.

I am in a similar boat with a 2070 Super, I play at 3440x1440 and I have to play at medium to get good, consistently smooth framerate (75-100fps). My 3700X is fine, but cannot justify a 2080Ti so waiting for the new 3 series cards.

djan

Battlefield V has notorious stuttering issues, nothing to do with your CPU, which is more than capable.

I have a much lower end system but turning off freesync and any extra bits like anti lag features/ prerendering frames seemed to help too.

Shlippery

- even loading the map!





I think it's this graph that maybe makes me think it's CPU..

Cuddlesworth

What that tells me is your graph is busted.

Homelander

Something very wrong with your system, not the 8600K inherently. Something else is eating up your CPU, or it's heavily downclocking, or something else strange. Fjell 652 is possibly the least intensive map in the game and in one of your screens you're at 35fps with little going on.....as you can see from the chart above, an 8600K is capable of almost 150fps average when GPU is not a factor and minimums of almost 90fps.

Even when I played BFV on my old quad core i3-9100F it would never drop anywhere near low as 35fps, especially not in that map.

Time to start investigating really. I would start by putting all bios settings back to stock, and having a look at what else is heavily using up all your CPU time while the game is running.

K.O.Kiki

"Max: 6616.82"

Is that supposed to be thread utilization or temperature?

Cuddlesworth

Homelander wrote: »

Time to start investigating really. I would start by putting all bios settings back to stock, and having a look at what else is heavily using up all your CPU time while the game is running.

Ahh I see the FPS counter top right

Lets see, Intel CPU and 2080 graphics card. 3-30 fps in game. No idea of graphics settings.

First question should probably be, what port is the monitor plugged into? Is it plugged into the graphics card?

Shlippery

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

Ahh I see the FPS counter top right

Lets see, Intel CPU and 2080 graphics card. 3-30 fps in game. No idea of graphics settings.

First question should probably be, what port is the monitor plugged into? Is it plugged into the graphics card?

First question hurts, it's most certainly plugged into the GPU! And to be fair, it powers through all other games no problem at Ultra everything.

Battlefield is the one pain in the ass. It runs a bit better with DX12 off, but then you lose the raytracing and all the RTX stuff, but you'd also expect the 100+ fps quoted with it disabed.

The screenshots above were everything fairly maxed out but even lowering them doesn't improve things much more.

Trying to think if there's any other fun way of debugging what goes on with Battlefield in particular...

Any suggested monitoring software to track usage

Cuddlesworth

You would be surprised at the amount of people using onboard with a discrete gpu.

What resolution is the monitor?
What resolution is BF5 running at?
If I remember correctly, they have a resolution scale in the advanced graphics settings. It should be at 100, which is 100% true resolution.

If dx11 runs fine but dx12 runs slow, then its RTX that's causing that problem. Reviewers will usually test at the fastest comparable settings, eg no RTX features.

Shlippery

Was nearly gonna give up on this but said I may as well pick your brains one last time.

If ye have any suggestions on any other diagnostics i might be missing out on - let me know, maybe this is more of a Battlefield V issue than my hardware specifically. Frustrating all the same.

1440p 144hz monitor, with g-sync enabled
Running BFV at 1440p


Here's one recorded today with all the Raytracing stuff turned off.

DX11, you can see settings at 1:20 mark.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlQqvVpb49c&feature=youtu.be

If ye've no idea, I'll chalk it off as a BFV issue and live in frustration!

Every other game is grand, granted Apex is taking a lot of my time lately and that wouldn't be the most demanding.

Homelander

Yeah that's brutal. It's not a BFV issue, the game isn't without its faults but that sort of horrific performance on an 8600K is indicative of something very wrong.

The problem may exist in other games, but BFV is far, far more CPU intensive in 64P conquest mode than the likes of Apex. For example, in BFV, constant flutters from 30-90fps will be a major, obvious headache, whereas in Apex, the same from 70-130fps wouldn't actually be so noticeable, even though the problem would still be present.

Have you tried restoring bios settings to default to eliminate something BFV is sensitive to in terms of RAM or CPU settings? If you use something like MSI Afterburner, is the 8600K maintaining it's clock speed at all times (ie, not constantly fluctuating between low and high states, which can cause stutter).

Are you also sure that there isn't something else eating up CPU time? Again, if malware or a rogue problem is eating up 50% of your CPU cycle, something like Apex Legends would still run >60fps as it's CPU friendly, whereas BFV would suffer heavily.

Finally, have you checked RAM? BFV is very RAM heavy and loves Dual Channel. If one of your sticks was faulty, BFV a) hates single channel and performs awful and b) often exceeds 8GB ram leading to swapping which makes things even worse.

I would say it's most definitely not something to chalk up to "just one of those things". I play a lot of BFV, when I had a 9600K it used to run at basically 80-100fps mostly, even on my 2nd machine with an i3-9100F I would never get that sort of performance in your video.

BloodBath

I'd say there's a lot of people running on single channel without knowing it as well.

The board makers don't always make it obvious where the first 2 sticks should go.

Shlippery

Homelander wrote: »

Yeah that's brutal. It's not a BFV issue, the game isn't without its faults but that sort of horrific performance on an 8600K is indicative of something very wrong.

The problem may exist in other games, but BFV is far, far more CPU intensive in 64P conquest mode than the likes of Apex. For example, in BFV, constant flutters from 30-90fps will be a major, obvious headache, whereas in Apex, the same from 70-130fps wouldn't actually be so noticeable, even though the problem would still be present.

Have you tried restoring bios settings to default to eliminate something BFV is sensitive to in terms of RAM or CPU settings?

If you use something like MSI Afterburner, is the 8600K maintaining it's clock speed at all times (ie, not constantly fluctuating between low and high states, which can cause stutter).

Are you also sure that there isn't something else eating up CPU time? Again, if malware or a rogue problem is eating up 50% of your CPU cycle, something like Apex Legends would still run >60fps as it's CPU friendly, whereas BFV would suffer heavily.

Finally, have you checked RAM? BFV is very RAM heavy and loves Dual Channel. If one of your sticks was faulty, BFV a) hates single channel and performs awful and b) often exceeds 8GB ram leading to swapping which makes things even worse.

I would say it's most definitely not something to chalk up to "just one of those things". I play a lot of BFV, when I had a 9600K it used to run at basically 80-100fps mostly, even on my 2nd machine with an i3-9100F I would never get that sort of performance in your video.

Alright - in that case, it'll be great if can remedy this, if not slightly depressing that I've had crippled performance for so long.

Have you tried restoring bios settings to default to eliminate something BFV is sensitive to in terms of RAM or CPU settings?

Yes, I've BIOS gone to stock.
MOBO - ASUS Prime Z370-Ahttps://amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0764H6HC8/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

If you use something like MSI Afterburner, is the 8600K maintaining it's clock speed at all times (ie, not constantly fluctuating between low and high states, which can cause stutter). Are you also sure that there isn't something else eating up CPU time? Again, if malware or a rogue problem is eating up 50% of your CPU cycle, something like Apex Legends would still run >60fps as it's CPU friendly, whereas BFV would suffer heavily.

Will boot this up now, never realized it'd be good for CPU monitoring. I'm fairly certain i'm clear on the Malware front CPU usage sitting normal in Task Manager when out of BFV.

EDIT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO_O0EWQT_E Skip in a couple minutes here to get an idea of how it's reading..seems to be stuck around 60fps but still seems low.

Finally, have you checked RAM? BFV is very RAM heavy and loves Dual Channel. If one of your sticks was faulty, BFV a) hates single channel and performs awful and b) often exceeds 8GB ram leading to swapping which makes things even worse.

RAM is definitely dual channel, funnily enough I had a bad RAM stick but replaced both of them recently which improved stability.


I've also gone and updated the GPU BIOS
(seems like there was a new revision, so why not)

Cuddlesworth

Your monitor is set to 60Hz and the game sits around 60fps. Edit, you should probably set it to 144hz in Windows.

Turn off GPU memory restriction.
Turn off the frame rate limiter.
Turn off Vsync.

Make sure nothing frame rate limiting is set in Nvidias control panel.

Cuddlesworth

Adding to this, make sure Freesync is enabled on the monitor. Its usually disabled within the monitor by default. And then look into adaptive sync, assuming you find out what is limiting FPS.

Shlippery

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

Your monitor is set to 60Hz and the game sits around 60fps. Edit, you should probably set it to 144hz in Windows.

Turn off GPU memory restriction.
Turn off the frame rate limiter.
Turn off Vsync.

Make sure nothing frame rate limiting is set in Nvidias control panel.

Nope, monitor's not locked to 60hz.. think Riva may have toggled on a limiter in that video above.



Changed the bfv frame rate limiter a few times, from 60, 120,144, Monitor Refresh rate, all the same and VYSNC off.

Getting 110-120fps in Apex.


https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/26356388 <- just ran this and there is something really weird with the cpu...

Cuddlesworth

Battlefield saw the monitor as 60hz, not sure why.

Top of the report-
Background CPU 96%

What does task manager/resource monitor say is happening to your cpu?

Shlippery

https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/26359819

Yea, this is looking more promising. I killed a few things. There must be something extremely problematic running in the background, but nothing immediately obvious jumps out.

EDIT: Whipped up a round again of BFV @ 1440p, DX12 on, RTX off..was getting around 120fps.

Seems like the culprit was Corsair's ICUE (...RGB control for my keyboard essentially.)

Turns out it was eating up the CPU. Not ideal.

Cheers for the push to keep checking! It only really seemed to disagree with BFV but I can live with that compromise!

Cuddlesworth

Shlippery wrote: »

https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/26359819

Yea, this is looking more promising. I killed a few things. There must be something extremely problematic running in the background, but nothing immediately obvious jumps out.

EDIT: Whipped up a round again of BFV @ 1440p, DX12 on, RTX off..was getting around 120fps.

Seems like the culprit was Corsair's ICUE (...RGB control for my keyboard essentially.)

Turns out it was eating up the CPU. Not ideal.

Cheers for the push to keep checking! It only really seemed to disagree with BFV but I can live with that compromise!

Battlefield is very well multithreaded, only real modern game engine that is that I can think of. I think it maxes out 6 threads usually, so if Corsair was ****ting on a single thread then you would see hits to BF performance versus other apps. If it was a 6 core, 12 thread model doubt you would have even noticed.

Homelander

I've actually heard that before about iCue. I can't remember the context, but it was really messing up performance in something, I remember there being a lot of talk about it on other forums.

Gamers Nexus did a video on lighting and monitoring software using up resources. iCue and NZXT Cam being the main culprits.

Shlippery

Deleted User wrote: »

Gamers Nexus did a video on lighting and monitoring software using up resources. iCue and NZXT Cam being the main culprits.

Oh that'd make even more sense. i've NZXT Cam too. I'm a sucker for lighting. Will try set static lights and save them to memory, then can the software.