X58 + X5660 CPU Utilization for 16 Games

Here is a complete list of all of the games that I have tested with the RTX 3080 with my X5660 CPU. This chart contains the average, minimum and maximum CPU utilization across 12 Threads. The main focus was 4K and 1440p. You can see the CPU utilization get better as the bottleneck issues are pushed towards the GPU. Focusing on 4K performance we can see that the X58 still has plenty of performance left depending on the game engine.

With 1080p and 1440p pushing 80% on average that’s definitely going to put a strain on your CPU for other functions, however there are ways around this. One way is to increase the resolution scaling to force more of the bottlenecking to the GPU. Going above 4K should not be a problem, but I will be testing this in the future as more powerful GPUs are released. Lower resolutions perform fine, but they will stress the CPU and hit a hard bottleneck. This bottleneck will not be noticeable outside of benchmark charts from my experience.