Howdy all,

I've been running BF3, and love it so far. However, my loading times first time through on a map are atrocious. I've narrowed it down to either my CPU or my HDD (course, those are about the only things AMIRITE).

My question stems from the resource monitor. I notice that the CPU is running at 100% maximum frequency, but the usage values are usually in the 40% to 50% range. Does that mean I need a better CPU? Or should I just work on trying to overclock the frequency? Or is it a signal of nothing being wrong and my HDD (not being an SSD) is the bottleneck.

Thx and Gig Em

I'm by no means an expert, but my guess it's writing the map to memory, so the bottleneck is HDD and then possibly RAM?

cpu % is not % of frequency. It is a measurement of how busy the cpu was over the measurement interval. If the cpu was 100% busy, then every sample taken during the measurement interval found that the cpu was executing a program other than "System idle process."

Based on the OP's post - speeding up the cpu will speed load, but will not improve game play. If you had a cpu 25% faster, the load would be faster, but utilization during the game would drop a bit.

In general, performance improvements occur by identifying the bottleneck. If your cpu is 100%, it is as busy as it can be. Speeding up your hard drive for that task will have no benefit. If you speed the cpu, then eventually it will stop being the bottleneck and improving other areas will become useful.

No expert either but graphics card is also important

All of them are important. But if one item is the bottleneck, fixing another is a waste of money.

I don't game, but game loading probably involves reading in huge digital files from disk - which the cpu has to process. A faster disk will probably help, but not during the phase when the cpu is 100%.

One of the things I mentioned to you during your computer build was that you might want to consider a better processor. Looks like I may have been right.

What CPU do you have?