What a Dilemma

[squidgyb]

Originally Posted by RocketDog

If it's graphic effects causing a slowdown, I doubt if it's anything to do with the CPU. I would also be very careful of trying to OC if you don't know what you are doing. That way lies smoking ruin for your PC.

Are you sure it's the exhaust and not the mirror?

With your PC you should definitely get pretty reasonable performance.

It's got a very good chance of being the CPU, in all honesty - the CPU "feeds" information to the GPU to display; if the CPU is lagging behind, the GPU has to wait for the CPU to give it what it needs to display the frame.

A quick and easy test would be to run a program(s) that displays a graph of CPU usage and GPU usage. In times of low fps as you describe, I'd expect to see the CPU working at 95-100%, and the GPU load dropping a little - though the GPU load may not drop at all, depending on what's going on and what screen resolution you're running at.

Overclocking is inherently dangerous, but that's why I directed Houndstone to an overclocking beginner's site - I won't be telling him to "press del on bootup and whack CPU voltage to 1.4 and yer done" - like anything fun in life - if approached in the wrong way it can indeed be dangerous/costly. Done in the correct, slow and safe way, there's very little risk involved.