Getting 7610 w/ a GTX 970...what's bottlenecking me?

[Assoul]

I recently upgraded to a GTX 970 and was expecting to get somewhere around 8,567 as per the results listed on http://bit.ly/2CuEdJD. However, I only scored 7,610. Here are my specs:

AMD FX-8350 (stock clock)
32 GB DDR3
And the video card itself is a single card installed on a PCI-e x16 2.0 slot.

At first, I though that the 2.0 specification would be slowing it down but, after speaking with an Nvidia support rep and reading other resources online, the difference between 3.0 and 2.0 would be negligible. I also watched my CPU Utilization during the test and it was steady at around 20%, so I don't think that overclocking it would help it much.

Any ideas, or other tests you can recommend?

Thanks!

[David (PassMark)]

20% CPU load means you have 1 core maxed out. So CPU overclocking would likely help a bit (the AMD FX-8350.is a 5 year old CPU now).
As you pointed out PCIe 2.0 also doesn't help, but the impact isn't too dramatic.

[David (PassMark)]

This combination of CPU and GPU is moderately common. We have around 1000 benchmark results for this combination. Your score is about average for the combination. So I don't think there is anything wrong.

The higher scores seem to be overclocked. Are you really sure yours was actually running at 5Ghz.
5Ghz is an extremely high overclock for air cooling. 4.3Ghz to 4.6Ghz is more common.