Under what circumstances will i7-3610QM bottleneck a 7970m?

I'm not experienced enough with hardware to know when or if this will be a problem. I probably should have asked this question before I ordered my laptop (only realized this could be a problem later), but I guess, live and learn, if it is.

Anyone know if this will limit the 7970m too much? Are there specific games or programs that will suffer from the weaker processor more than others?

I was always under the impression that it was almost entirely the GPU that limited how well games ran, but on further reading, it looks like the CPU is fairly important too. Is there any actual way to tell before making a purchase or can it only be found through benchmarking?

 

Your CPU should suffice for anything these days giving the small bump in performance that entry Ivy bridge CPU has over the middle entry Sandy.
However when dealing with new setup don't save on CPU; I'm not telling you to get the best out there, but a middle end CPU could lead to some future proof situations.
Dont bother right now until you want an higher benchmarks score, you can still upgrade your CPU later since its really easy to do so.

 

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This is exactly why I went from 3610 to 3720. There should be no bottlenecking but if future games did cause some of that, you'd be forced to upgrade then and if newer generations are out, it might be harder to find "older" Ivy Bridge processors. The next generation will use a different socket.

 

300MHz is not going to do you much good if/when the time comes that the 7970m is bottlenecked by the CPU.

 

I said that 3610 should NOT bottleneck the 7970M but that future games could (maybe, probably, perhaps...) cause it to. Not all games would just depend on GPU. There are many underlying factors that made me change my configuration (during order). If a newer GPU came out and I wanted it and it does get bottlenecked by the 3610QM and that CPU can't be overclocked. Like Kingpinzero said just trying to keep it a little bit more future proof. Also when I researched before buying my laptop, I found out that 3610QM can't be OC'd like 3720 and 3820 can. That pretty much pushed me to put down $160 more.

 

The CPU won't bottleneck you until a game like Crysis 7 get released and is partially relied on CPU work aswell as GPU work.......

 

^ I guess. I still have trouble believing that an OC'ed 3720QM would do much good IF the 7970m were to ever be bottlenecked by the CPU. I mean are you really gonna keep your laptop for over 3 years?

 

Lol. Yup! I plan to have it around for 4+ years. That way I can say I've milked it for every penny I've spent. That doesn't mean I won't get anther one in the meantime or whatever.

 

Just like maverick here said, when that certain 'future' point you wish to proof against comes, there really won't be much difference between that 3610 and 3720. Not one bit.

I knew a guy about 4-5 years ago who got triple GPUs, the ultimate water-cooling system you could get, the best CPU you could think of, and the fastest memory possible at that time just to 'future proof'. Naturally, it cost him a small fortune. About 2-3 years later (roughly around the DX 10 period), even a low mid-range machine of that time could run games better than his PC.

Bottom line - get whatever you feel like, it's your money after all, but you can't really future proof, so it's not worth losing your head about it. If you like the bragging rights, though, that's a different scenario

 

Except for the ability to OC.

Don't get me wrong. If someone's budget is dead set, upgrading from a 3610 wouldn't make any sense. I'd sooner use that money for a proper gaming mouse, for example, if I were in that situation. But I do believe to a certain extend you can future proof a computer. In a few years a laptop with 3610 will run the same as it always has, more or less, and so will a laptop with a 3720. The difference is that one will run whatever new games a little better (read: bearable to play) than the other depending on what that new game is. That's a scenario full of uncertainty but even then there is some future proofing there.

My example is this: my friend built a desktop, I think with a Q6600, and has had it for years. He only plays DoTA, LoL, etc. When Diablo 3 came out, I had to buy a whole new computer (this Malibal) to play D3. All he had to do was uninstall a few things off his SSD to make room. Sure, I can play at the absolute highest settings, but he is playing D3 at medium and he didn't have to spend $2,000. At the time he bought his desktop, he spent more than I did with mine and now he can say, even if the example is just for Diablo 3 --a non-graphic intensive game, that his computer lasted longer than mine. Four years down the road who knows if I'll have $2,000 to buy a new one for a new game? So I paid $160 now just in case.

EDIT: I know someone might think why didn't I just spend $100-200 on a low-mid video card and play D3. Well, when you have a 3-4 year-old computer, do you really want to spend on anything on it? The mobo is old, the ram for that mobo is obsolete, etc. Dropping $100-200 on a dying computer that you can't carry over if you're building a new one doesn't make sense. To me that's kissing $100-200 good bye.

 

You can't even OC the 3720QM in a Malibal, correct? Then you're no more future proof than a 3610QM.

 

3720qm is overclockable in any clevo unit via xtu

 

Seanzky, I'm currently playing D3 on medium with my Sony Vaio Z that cost my a pretty penny back then, and I'm telling you right now - your friend isn't future proofing, he's compromising.

I can play almost every game on this Sony Vaio Z by dialing it down and accepting some long delays. But it isn't much fun watching blurred games and waiting minutes for a game to load. I prefer just buying a great machine and replace it every few years than just being able to run the game by spending a small fortune on the very top end possible a few years before that and compromising on graphic detail.

But you know what? It depends on many factors when you buy your machine. A 7970M is a much better investment than a 680M, but I still went for the 680M because...because I felt like it
So go ahead and enjoy your 3720

 

No XTU in P150EM just like Kevin said...

 

I don't think it is about being on a budget. Even IF you did have an extra 160 lying around, you'd get more value out of it by getting an extra SSD. I saw the 3DMark11 scores of a guy who had a core i7 780qm or whatever from Sept. 2009. That's three years. They were about 100 points lower than mine.

 

None where it'll ever make a difference. Unless you game on emulators like pcsx2 & dolphin perhaps, because they are very CPU intensive (but the i7-3610qm should already fare very well in that regard).

 

single threaded games. CS Source and such. Any high end Single threaded game will suffer. Rome total war is another. I get 10-30FPS with a 920xm at 3.33GHz with 25k units. The my 260m is at like 15% utilization. I don't know if medieval II or Empire or newer ones are multithread but if you play those games just beware of that.

EDIT: in CS Source with max graphics with my 920xm at 3.33GHz i get 40-120fps and GPU jumps from 50-80% utilization. Still playable but you get the picture. Those are the only types of games where you will have problems that I can think of.

Also the 3720 can be OC slightly so that is the biggest advantage. Dont ask me how much. I dont got a clue

 

Sure there are a few games that lie in that region. OP can be one of the few that could play those games very frequently. That being said, there was a small period when multi threaded CPUs were coming out and games were still using one core. That hasn't been the case for quite a while. So in the FUTURE, it is not really going to matter.

 

The points about single-dual threaded applications are extremely valid. Any older games, even some more modern ones (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat), and most emulators for PS2 etc will benefit from every MHz you can increase your core speed. So the base +300MHz and up to another 400MHz in single core mode could really help you out.

 

Yeah, also I'm not trying to convince the OP. I stated my opinion based on my use. I'm one of those who still play CS and can't wait for CS:GO. I honestly believe that my laptop will last just a little longer (for my use --may be very different from yours) because I spent $160. As for getting a bigger SSD. I will when the need arises. I didn't have a budget constraint building this laptop, I just wanted the best "bang for my buck". That's all.

 

If you play at low resolution and turn down the eye candy, the 7970m will be bottlenecked by the CPU.

 

lol, people use there laptops on average 4 years I believe. Anyway if nvidia maxwell is really as good as they say it is then I am sure many people will upgrade from this gen to next gen. Some people use it for 6 years. I still have my d820 wuxga 1920x1200 screen t7600 c2d etc my bro uses as a portable dvdplayer to show a video of the companies product. Still got good battery life after buying another 9 cell one and this laptop was bought late 2007 and we got a cheap upgrade from a t5500 to a t7600. It has 2gb ram 160gb hdd. Cost £332 and had office 07 and windows vista ultimate.

The d820 still looks like a good business laptop.

Anyone who has a 3610qm will not get bottlenecked on anything other then a few seconds shaved off on encoding/rendering or benchmark scores or vt.

I reckon the 3612qm laptop should easily be good speed come 2016 let alone a 3610qm or 3720qm. I think these days for 90% of tasks a 3612qm or up is good enough easily and very fast at doing tasks that you really don't need more performance.

Anyway my point is a 7970m laptop would still be good until 2016 if it is reliable. I personally think upgrading every 4 years is the best. Like I got mine in january 2009 and it was a few months old then and with windows 7 upgrade and 320gb upgrade it cost me a total of £360. Now that is great value for money. The only problem I have ever had with it is the cpu being slow. Now any i5 dual core with ht will play games on a 7970m without really bottlenecking. I7 quads will allow recording with fraps.

My personal advice is get the best laptop deal at the time and the best features and design and build quality laptop. Mine was the premium range so I get all the bells and whistles.

 

Also note that from my experience running a single threaded game does not use turbo boost. On my 920xm I can set ~3.5GHz 1, 2, and 3 cores and 4th core at 2GHz and I will always run at 2GHz while playing source. I honestly dont get it. I'll set affinity to 1 core and I still run at 2GHz. Windows, CS:S, or intel chip will never run anyone on a single core....I dont get it. So realize you maybe very likely to get stock at lowest speed. I take the single thread turbo boost with a grain of salt after learning how my 720qm and 920xm work with CS:S

what do you mean? In CS:S I only see the bottleneck after i max graphics. It is because all the physics is CPU based and not GPU.

Not saying your wrong I just dont understand what your getting at.


sidenote. I am in the ballpark that upgrading a cpu on a laptop is relatively pointless due to cost. 150 300 600 bucks is pointless or whatever the price is. I only like the 3720 because you can overclock it a little bit and it doesn't cost that much. Also I am a strong believe in getting cheapest quad core and buy the XM chip 1-3 years later after you cna snag it for 200-300 bucks. The XM chips are a beast overclocked even after 1-3 years. My 920xm I got from DR is rockin.

 

CSS is not single threaded. The source engine has been updated years ago to be multi-threaded. Check your settings.

 

either way as single or multithreaded you run at lowest quad core speed. Also the multithread feature is poorly made and does not work that well. The performance gain is minimal. Even ask Allurgrocies. He explained this before why CS:S multithreading is a joke and why cpu is the bottleneck

http://imageshack.us/g/651/csssettingsp.png/

these screen shots are from my 720QM. If you want me to really prove that setting my 920xm at 3.33GHz helps a ton but still has issues running it fluently I'll do it over the weekend when I got time. CS:S blows when it comes to this just like the Total War games

when roudn loads with all bots are alive i am running at 17% utilization. When all the bots are dead I get 60-80% roughly. Showing the CPU is the bottleneck

With nearly double the CPU speed with 3.33Ghz with my 920xm it is much better but the CPU is still a bottleneck. at beginning of round I run at 30-40FPS instead of 19 or less. It still drops below 30FPS once in awhile.

 

CPU are way ahead in GPU in terms of synergy and gaming.

Even a game known to be cpu heavy like RTS games will be far from being bottlenecked by your cpu.

Its not like having a faster cpu will magically future proof you for upcomming games so that you dont get a bottleneck because new games wont be just more cpu demanding but also gpu demanding as well so both components will fall behind the curve and having a faster cpu still wont help you.

Bottlenecks are about synergy, and the gpu is almost always the weakest link and there is no reason to upgrade past a 3610QM unless your doing cpu work like encoding or rendering.

You can of course play 400x200 and bottleneck any gpu from 2005 and onward with the fastest cpu in the world. But this would only be in the technical sense of bottleneck in where the gpu is 100% load and preventing the gpu from gathering a higher load waiting for cpu resources.

However your framerate will be 200+ and we all know that 60fps is what you need for gaming ideally and anything past that is a waist, infact its a waist in all accounts not to turn on vsync and lock your game at 60fps to prevent your cpu and gpu from over working for no reason.

So technical bottleneck? Yes and its a forced situation.

Real life bottleneck? No, and they should not be confused or stated as being the same thing.

 

If you have a powerful GPU but you make its job much easier with a low resolution and low graphics settings, it will be able to produce a very high frame rate, so the FPS is more determined by how much work the CPU can provide it with. The CPU's work is independent of resolution, and completely or mostly independent of many graphical effects.

If you look at CPU gaming benchmarks, you will notice that they use the most powerful graphics cards they can with minimal resolution and settings in order to make the CPU the limiting factor in order to compare various models.

 

I just tested CSS. I average 97% GPU utilization, over 200 FPS average, and my CPU usage hovers around 30-40% with multicore enabled. Doesn't look even remotely close to a CPU bottleneck. The GPU is still holding me back. At minimum I'll hit 120 FPS on a 30+ person office map.

With multicore disabled I average ~130 FPS. It makes a difference.

With it enabled & multipliers forced at 31x:

http://img717.imageshack.us/img717/9523/ss1hb.png

With just plain old Turbo enabled & multicore:

http://img804.imageshack.us/img804/6697/ss3sq.png

Same results. CS:S seems to have no problem utilizing all four cores. The only way I was able to replicate your problem was with limiting CSS to single core only. Whenever there were tons of bullets and sounds going off, my GPU usage would dip to the mid 70%'s. With multicore enabled, it never budged from 97%.

 

did you use the same settings? Also you have a faster CPU. That one was with a 720qm. I will redo it with the 920xm this weekend. Again your cpu is faster then my 720qm your proving my point that it is cpu bottlenecked. I will redo with 920xm at 3.33GHz and you will still se it bottlenecked. Also did you use 32 bots?

you need max settings with 32 bots to get what i am saying. Also if you go to chateau map and have a bunch of dead bodies floating in the water it will kill frame rate because that is all CPU. Get in a fight with 32 bots and have 15 corpse floating in the water and your frame rate and GPU utilization will drop.

also note when that happens you turn around looking away from bodies your frame rate will go up because Source is designed to only have physics going on with what is in front of you. Anything behind you is not calculated. This was designed this way to help make Source runs smoothly when it first came out

without same settings you are comparing granny smith apples to red delicious.

 

Well you told me you had a 3.33ghz quad and I have a 3.1ghz quad. Same settings, server had between 30-40 people at anytime. *Oops textures was only on high.

I'll test with bots, but my point is that CS:S is mulithreaded and it makes good use of those extra cores. Clearly I take a big FPS hit when I switch to single-core mode and my GPU utilization drops to 70% occasionally.

Edit: Okay, I see what you are saying, I'll dip to 40 FPS, but isn't this more of an issue because you are running the server at the same time? Why do bots matter, what happens on multiplayer maps?

Just tried a bunch of multiplayer servers, dust2, inferno, italy, etc and 120 is the minimum I'll get (I guess 80 when I get flashed, but my GPU utilization never drops below 97%). I normally play with bloom off as it's just outright annoying so that adds some to the FPS, but for this time I had it enabled to match your settings.

I think running with bots is an unfair comparison. Your computer is doing all the calculations for the bots as it's not only running the server, but also rendering what you do.

 

bots are controlled by CPU so it adds a huge load on CPU hence why FPS take a hit because there is not enough CPU utilization to keep up with GPU. Notice that your CPU never really goes higher than 25-40% even though it could/should? The multicore utilization is very poor with the game. You would figure they could make it better because bots could easily be spread out on several cores.

That is my point though CS:S is a game that can be limited by CPU. Along with Total War games. Play Rome total war with 25k units....you need a desktop CPU overclocked to handle that. I don't know if any or which ones are multithreaded but the older ones definitely are not.

 

CS:S still takes advantage of multiple cores. You'll never experience such a strain during any real gameplay. It's like saying furmark makes my GPU hit 95*C, but BF3 will only hit 85*C, my cooling system is clearly inadequate because of furmark. If GPU utilization is at 100% and CPU is at 30%, it means you are GPU bottlenecked. I get 150 FPS, do I really give a damn about any more? No, the game is 8 years old.

Multicore utilization may be poor, but it exists and makes a tangible difference. You'll never be running a server with 32 bots in reality, thus you won't ever be CPU bottlenecked in CS:S.

RTS games are a different story. SC2 is enough of an experience for me to say that the CPU plays a huge role, because of pathfinding of hundreds of units. Other than massive-scale RTS games, rarely will you ever find yourself CPU bottlenecked.

 

I play with bots all the time....it is a very real world issue.....

For temps I run F@H 100% GPU and 100% CPU is very real world....hence why i have modded my cooling system and still am. I can barely handle this 920xm in my laptop with all my mods.

 

Sorry, I never expected anyone to play a multiplayer based game with only bots. For 99.99% of people, CS:S will never present a CPU bottleneck. I was under the assumption that you played on other servers, where such an issue would never arise. I can see your point now that you are more specific.

Otherwise, yeah, massive-scale RTS games can have CPU bottlenecks. One of those I've found to be is SC2 on ultra settings. On high, I never came across a CPU bottleneck.

 

i ahte playing online due to cheaters and other reasons...just looses its fun. See the BF3 cheat videos....dumb

 

Thanks for the long discussion. Answered a lot of related questions too. Good stuff.

 

The only thing that bottlenecks the 7970m is enduro...

 

Will my 920xm bottleneck a 7970m? I am about to buy one and upgrade and just want to make sure it won't be bottlenecked by the CPU.

 

in the applications i talked about it will. But if you overclock the 920xm as fast as you can you should be fine i 90%+ games

 

Just buy a new machine with ivy bridge and 7970m. your cpu is 45nm ivy bridge 22nm and tri gate transistors and igpu dx11 hd 4000 as well as more thin profile, less electricity wasted.

 

his 920xm is still really good if he overclocks it..if it overvolts it a hair he is golden. why buy a new 2-3 grand laptop when you can have nearly the exact same thing for 500 bucks by buying a new GPU?

 

Its not the same thing though. 920xm is 45nm ivy bridge is 22nm. His 920xm is using the same process 45nm as mine. Also you can get laptops for £600 that have a 3612qm that takes half the power of his 920xm and easily beats the 920xm. even i5 dual cores beats his 920xm.

 

An overclocked 920XM will destroy a dual core, in any game which really uses four cores.

Overclocked at 3Ghz or more, I don't see it bottlenecking the 7970M, except in the most CPU intensive games, such as Civ V and Shogun: Total War.

 

Well, if you play games like Civ 5, the CPU makes more difference.

For example, on a huge map with 15 A.I. enemies and 10 city states, toward the end of the game you will be waiting longer at the end of each turn than you would be with a faster CPU. Even with a desktop i7-2600k, you would still be waiting around, but it would be shorter.

 

An overclocked 920XM wont hold back a 7970M in anything but benchmarks.

 

So you're recommending someone spend $1,500 + on a new system with a 7970M, rather than ~$250 for a graphics upgrade (sell off old one) because of the manufacturing process and power consumption? What a joke. The 920XM OC'ed can hold it's own very well.

 

The irony is that in a different thread he advocates a 660m over a 675m for gaming because of the savings garnered by reduced energy consumption.

 

I just had to laugh. $1500 upgrade then you say $250 upgrade by selling off old one. Anyway 920xm will struggle recording gameplay with fraps recordiing.

He could always sell his old laptop and upgrade as well.

 

920xm oc'd with a 7970m will require probably around 240w power supply.