Source engine games are CPU intensive. Your card isn't very good, but the 4590 is still more of a bottleneck than the 750ti I'm pretty sure.

so you're saying to upgrade to a better cpu, while still pairing it with the 750ti?

or you're saying to upgrade to the 960 and pair that with my current i5 4590?

Your CPU is most likely the bottleneck because Source is a CPU-heavy engine, but you're not going to get much better. You need to look for single-thread performance, so your best bet there is getting a K-series processor to overclock, but it seems pretty wasteful when a 4590 is still a pretty good CPU.

I think you might still want to consider upgrading your GPU if you play any non-source games. Outside of CS/TF2 upgrading your processor is going to do next to nothing as long as you still have a 750Ti.

Just check the CPU and GPU usage. If one of them is constantly at or close to 100% you've found the bottleneck.

EDIT: I might just test it myself if I'm bored.

I find it hard to believe a 4590 would be bottlenecking a 750ti even in a source game.

low thread count. TECHNICALLY the 4590 is the bottleneck, although it really shouldn't be, but source is a special snowflake.

i just checked them with hwmonitor. both are almost always below 20%

While ingame?
And you're sure you've got multicore rendering enabled?

when i'm ingame

http://i.imgur.com/841w2Iu.png

yes, i have multicore rendering enabled, core parking disabled, -thread 4, etc.

Why not just overclock it? I got some pretty large gains overclocking my 3630qm on my laptop and my 920 on my desktop, both of which are locked chips. Plus your temperatures seem pretty low, so I don't see the issue here. If you need more cooling, a better CPU cooler is relatively inexpensive compared to a new CPU and can fit multiple sockets as well.

that literally doesn't seem possible

are you running fullscreen and tabbing out? do it in windowed mode so the game doesn't put itself to sleep when you're measuring it

there's no way it's using that little of both CPU and GPU

ok so i did that and now it's really inconsistent. sometimes, both the cpu and gpu usage go low as 20%, and the next few seconds it's at 90%

#11 how do you overclock a locked cpu?

changing the bclk (base clock?) instead of the multiplier, which you do for unlocked cpus

i know some people were able to get the i7 4790 (3.6, 4.0 turbo) to 4.0 base clock

Set the convar engine_no_focus_sleep to 0 if you want a source game to run at the same framerate when it's not maximized or actively selected (in the case of windowed mode).

Honestly you should just be happy with the frames you're getting....

Tbh you should be getting more frames with that cpu, I never dip below 200fps with an i5-4400 with an r7 260x, my cpu is significantly worse and the r7 260x is basically the same as a 750ti. I'm also on 1280x960 but with medium settings.

144hz monitor, and it's annoying when it dips below 150 fps

what if i switch to 1920x1080 with a few graphics tuned up a little. should i get the r9 290?

You should be able to squeeze out a much better frame rate with your current system. There is probably a setting (other than those in your video settings menu) that are slowing you down.

These are my nvidia settings for csgo

http://i.imgur.com/RleJkvG.png

http://i.imgur.com/uxYuB53.png

http://i.imgur.com/M5GLTab.png