What is the bottleneck?

[Emptyvoid]

Motherboard: MSI 890FXA-GD70 AM3+ AMD 890FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard

Crossfired Graphics Card: 2x XFX HD-577A-ZNFC Radeon HD 5770 (Juniper XT) 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card
(Overclocked. GPU:915 MHz Memory Clock Settings: 1350 MHz)

CPU: AMD Phenom II X6 1055T Thuban 2.8GHz Socket AM3 125W Six-Core Desktop Processor HDT55TFBGRBOX
(Overclocked to 3.360Ghz)

Ram: G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model F3-12800CL9D-4GBRL

PSU: OCZ ModXStream Pro 700W Modular High Performance Power Supply compatible with Intel Sandybridge Core i3 i5 i7 and AMD Phenom

Hard drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST31000528AS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

I'm thinking of upgrading my system to get some better performance but I'm not quite sure what the bottleneck is here (Well besides the hard drive). So what do you guys think is the bottle neck and is it worth upgrading to an SSD?

 

[Sean W.]

I don't really see a bottleneck there... if I had to say the graphics cards are the weakest links in your rig...

 

[Shaynk]

When are you experiencing a bottleneck? As said nothing really noticeable cards are somewhat dated, and you could push the x6 higher also

 

[Emptyvoid]

Seems I definitely used bottleneck inappropriately. I was more so wondering what should be the next thing for me to upgrade to get the best bang for my buck.

 

[Sean W.]

ah, indeed you did. a bottleneck si when one piece of hardware bogs down another... for example if you have an old pentium processor and a current gen graphics card, the processor would severely limit the performance of the graphics card. that is a bottleneck...

what i would suggest doing is buying a 6970 or a 570 and sell your 5770s for $100 each to make up the cost... also get a CPU cooler ( if you dont already have one ) and overclock your processor, 3.8 to 4.0ghz is very tangible with that chip and you would have a very capable little rig!

with your powersupply i wouldnt suggest anything higher than a 6970 or a 570, any cards high than that might string out what your power supply can do a little too tight...

 

[Emptyvoid]

Thanks Sean

I'm worried about overclocking the chip to that much though, I've tried to get it to 3.5 but my computer would shut down when I restarted it. That's probably just me doing something wrong though.

A 6970 would be worthwhile upgrade over my crossfired cards currently? If so that's great

 

[Sean W.]

your crosffire 5770's score 16423 points in 3dmark Vantage...

a 6970 scores 21491 and a GTX 570 scores 21931 in the same the 3dmark Vantage benchmark...

 

[Slaymate]

You do have a bottleneck, your cpu @ 2.8 GHz. You need to increase your cpu speed by at least 1 GHz.

 

[Geff-]

agree, i wouldent bother with six cores that much and worry more about the speed of them as games will not take advantage of all the cores in a long time from now

 

[Emptyvoid]

All right, in the past when I've increased my fsb to anything that put the Ghz over 3.5, my computer would shut itself down. Do i need to increase the voltage or something? My overclocking knowledge is rather limited.