Stutters and FPS drops occur when the 1st core is loaded above 75-80%. Overall CPU load may remain very low at the same time because usually there are 4 cores in total. Therefore it is necessary to monitor load per core and overclock. (2.8 to 3.8 helped me a lot).
My video card is loaded 98-100% all the time because it is a bottle-neck in my system.
AMD @3.4 can be a bottle neck because it is generally slower than Intel nowadays and especially in case it is Athlon it has very low or no cache at all which is extremely important for gaming. In case it is Phenom and not Athlon it has some cache but a lower one than modern Intel processors. Gaming benchmarks on PC sites usually show this very well.
Last edited by Ataros; 01-26-2012 at 09:59 AM.
|