AMD FX-4100 Fixed!! bizarre...

[TheLastEmp 295]

So, I've been extremely frustrated by my FX-4100 Bulldozer running ARMA 2 and DayZ SA like absolute shit over the past year (GPU usage never went above 70% as a result of cpu bottlenecking), and so when I came across a cheap AMD Athlon X2 3.4Ghz I figured why not throw it in my rig and see what happens...

 

Well... It ran even worse... Which I guess I shouldn't be totally surprised by, it was just the my FX-4100 bulldozer was such shit (13-17 fps in cities) I had to give it a shot... 

 

Anyway, I take the Athlon X2 out and put the FX-4100 back in and load up DayZ and voila! I'm suddenly getting 100%+ gpu usage and am bottoming out around 28-30 FPS in cities...  I can't even begin to understand how the hell this happened but if anyone can lend any insight I would greatly appreciate it... Playing DayZ now is like playing it for the first time all over again because the cities are actually playable.

 

Just so confused as to how this could've helped... or what was going wrong before I swapped the CPU's 

 

Edit: System specs

MSI FXA-990gd80 mobo

FX-4100 bulldozer @ 3.8Ghz

GTX 660 with PrecisionX K-boost enabled

8Gb ram @ 1600

7200 rpm HD

Windows 7

Edited January 6, 2014 by TheLastEmp

[fluxley 2228]

I've seen a few reports that the rv engine doesn't quite know what to do with the fx series cpu's due to their newer shared module design, basically your fx-4100 will work better is you run with the startup parameter -cpuCount=2 despite it being a quad core.

 

My guess is that installing the dual core athlon automatically set it to use 2 cores and for whatever reason when you put the quad core fx in it is still set to think there are 2 cores.

 

to test you could try setting to -cpuCount=4 and then -cpuCount=2 comparing the results

[TheLastEmp 295]

I tried using the startup parameters prior to cpu swapping with no change whatsoever, even tried parking cores 3&4 on the FX and OC'ing a bit further which did nothing... I'll take a stab at it though for curiosity sake