New PC purchase, need some help/advice

[silaent]

Hi,

 

I recently got a friend of mine to help me purchase a computer. I trusted his word because frankly I didn't know what to get at all. Ended up buying a new PC at Bestbuy and sticking a new graphics card and power supply in it.

Anyway, long story short, here are my specs. (Please don't flame me about whether or not I got screwed.)

 

AMD FX 6100 6-core Processor

10 GB Ram

64 Bit Windows

Nvidia GeForce 560 Ti (1GB)

 

(If you need any more Info let me know, its

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?cc=us&lc=en&dlc=en&docname=c03154290

this computer with the added graphics card.)

 

I assumed this would be a fine setup, my friend told me it was more powerful than his and he runs his game on ultra. Given I have some mods running.. but not that many (in comparison with how many I've seen others have running) however, I disabled all mods, ran an ENB (nothing but DOF) and used the ENB's FPS counter to check my FPS. It never got above 45. and even so, dwindled down to 30-ish often. This is with less than ultra settings.

 

My question is, Is my setup simply not powerful enough to run this game on the higher settings? If it isn't, what could be my bottleneck, or is it simply some tweaks that would give me what I need? If there's something more I need to achieve a system that can handle this game with better FPS I'd love your input because I have this summer to make money and see about getting the parts I need.

 

Thanks for the help!

 

(edit: The more I play, I see that my FPS does hit the mid 50's in areas, but no matter where I am there are these "ticks" where the FPS hits even below 10 for a second or two.)

Edited June 15, 2012 by silaent

[hoofhearted4]

first i would cross reference your FPS with something like FRAPS. maybe this ENBs is popular. but idk it. and if its maybe for Skyrim that would be why as ive never played it lol. but yea. cross reference it. if your still getting the same numbers, then um...yea. we will go from there..

[silaent]

first i would cross reference your FPS with something like FRAPS. maybe this ENBs is popular. but idk it. and if its maybe for Skyrim that would be why as ive never played it lol. but yea. cross reference it. if your still getting the same numbers, then um...yea. we will go from there..

 

:) thanks for replying. I used FRAPS and got nearly the same numbers (the ENB itself drops me 8-10 FPS)

[hoofhearted4]

so wait, was FRAPS ~10 FPS higher? what numbers were you getting with FRAPS?

[Dan3345]

Silaent I am unbiased (or at least I try to be for the most part) and my first computer build used an 1100T AMD Black which is a six core much like you have now.

 

In my experience I did not get anywhere near the frames I thought I should.

 

Then I switched to Intel. For now AMD is not the worth the money, unless you really can't afford Intel.

 

My advice, if you are hungry for high FPS (Like I am) would be to save some pennies for Intel.

Edited June 16, 2012 by Dan3345

[Rennn]

My Phenom II x4 is nothing to be envious of, but it handles Skyrim on ultra at higher framerates than Silaent's pc. In fact, his rig is better than mine. Idk why he's not getting higher frames per second. Edited June 16, 2012 by Rennn

[Dan3345]

My Phenom II x4 is nothing to be envious of, but it handles Skyrim on ultra at higher framerates than Silaent's pc. In fact, his rig is better than mine. Idk why he's not getting higher frames per second.

Not completely sure, but I believe the 6100 is running on a bulldozer architecture which forwhatever reason does not run scripts properly on windows 7. An issue which AMD admitted at launch and which they have been working with microsoft to fix, so far the only fix is to get windows 8. Last I heard of course.

[tetradite]

I very very nearly got the same processor, when I bought a setup about 2 months ago. The specs on it LOOK really good for the money, but when you start digging into actual performance tests on that (range) of processors they really do not perform well at all (compared to other processors by AMD and Intel with same/similar clock speeds). IIRC the areas where that processor range does perform well are NOT gaming applications.

 

Also, (and I fully admit I don't understand this bit thoroughly) the 6-core (8-core for higher in the range) is a little bit misleading, because it basically puts the cores into pairs and then runs them through one "channel" which basically removes most of the added benefit of the extra cores? Someone more tech-savvy can confirm/deny/explain this better than me...

 

Basically you have more than enough RAM, and the 560ti is a good enough card to be running at Ultra. IF you want to "blame" a part of this system for you not getting the performance you expect, I'd point my finger at the processor. But, there's no way you (or your friend) could have known this just from the published specs. The published specs on it look excellent, it just doesn't live up to them. I only avoided buying one myself because someone on the Nexus warned me off them and I did a lot of research after the warning.

 

(I'm not a fanboy of any company's products - my current PC is the first "real" pc I've had, so I'm not slamming AMD here, but that range of processors just does not compete with the equivalent Intel products atm, not even on value for money even with their lower prices).

[FMod]

They are real cores, they just aren't very fast cores. While they have shared x86 decoders, that's just part of the architecture.

 

So Phenom II or Athlon FM1 is better.

 

 

which forwhatever reason does not run scripts properly on windows 7.

Never heard of that. It would be very strange, really, since a CPU just runs the instructions given, it either does it right or doesn't.

 

What it has an issue with - or, rather, what issue Windows 7 has with Bulldozer, is that it can't properly assign threads to its cores. Like virtual HT cores, Bulldozer cores are paired into modules. The correct way to assign threads is to Core 0, then Core 2, 4, 6, then Core 1, then 3, 5, 7.

It's a lot more complex than that really, but that's about the general idea.