SpaceBooger wrote:After reading the article Noise posted. I used MIS Afterburner to monitor CPU and GPU usage and I tried it with 3 games:
Deadpool maxed out the CPU use stayed under 50%
Ryse Sone of Rome maxed out and the CPU use maxed out at 80% and GPU around 70% at times
SKYRIM (original) maxed out with some mods the CPU use maxed out at 30% and GPU around 50%
Maybe it's not bottlenecked.
It depends how you are monitoring, are you monitoring each core? Because your 6 cores may give a reading of only using say 66% because it has 4 cores being maxed out because the game is not using the last 2 cores. So if you were on a CPU with better IPC then you would get better performance from the 4 cores being used. This is the reason Intels platform, though having half the thread count as Ryzen, still beats it in gaming, as its IPC is higher.
Don't know if I worded that the best I could. But you are best to monitor each thread, not the overall CPU usage, if that is what you were looking at.
Another way is to run a benchmark from a game, then overclock your cpu a bit and see if the results jump up, as this will increase you IPC.
When you say you were using MSI afterburner, I assume you mean you were using Rivatuner, make sure in the options in MSI Afterburner, you are watching each thread, not just CPU usage.
If this is the case, jumping up to a higher core count wont break any sort of bottleneck as the IPC won't be changing only the thread count. Just overclock your cpu 500mhz or so and you would see the same performance increase you would see by jumping across CPU's. They are both Piledriver architecture, so other than the increase in mhz, you won't see much real world difference in gaming.
I would not waste the money on it regardless, only a higher IPC will help you relieve the bottleneck being put on the 980, you would be moving sideways not upwards.
For example
Skyrim by default only uses 2 threads! So you are maxing out those two threads if it is showing 30% overall usage on your CPU.
