Question Performance problems with PC I recently sold to a friend ?

[Spodolf]

Recently, I sold my less than 3-year-old PC to a friend. The system was in perfect working condition at the time. However, a few days post-sale, the PC started experiencing severe issues, including Windows failing to launch.

Upon investigation, I discovered that one of the RAM sticks was faulty. I removed the defective stick, leaving the system with 8GB of RAM instead of the original 16GB. After this, the system booted up normally and seemed to function as expected. I gave it back to my friend promising to get him a new kit.

However, my friend has recently reported that the system is experiencing performance issues again. While games run at a decent base framerate, there are constant FPS drops. Additionally, tabbing out of games causes the system to slow down significantly. Some games, including ones that are not resource-intensive like Overwatch, are practically unplayable due to severe frame-drops.

I’m trying to diagnose the issue and have a couple of theories. Could the remaining RAM stick have also gone bad? Is it common for two RAM sticks to fail simultaneously? Or could the system really be underperforming this much due to only having 8GB of RAM? Could there potentially be another issue at play, such as thermal throttling? He did report having dropped the PC from a few inches off the ground, so potentially that could have loosened the cooler.

My friend isn’t very tech-savvy, so I will be taking a closer look at the system myself. However if any of you have had a system be in a similar situation and know of any evident solutions, that'd be great. Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[CountMike]

Recently, I sold my less than 3-year-old PC to a friend. The system was in perfect working condition at the time. However, a few days post-sale, the PC started experiencing severe issues, including Windows failing to launch.

Upon investigation, I discovered that one of the RAM sticks was faulty. I removed the defective stick, leaving the system with 8GB of RAM instead of the original 16GB. After this, the system booted up normally and seemed to function as expected. I gave it back to my friend promising to get him a new kit.

However, my friend has recently reported that the system is experiencing performance issues again. While games run at a decent base framerate, there are constant FPS drops. Additionally, tabbing out of games causes the system to slow down significantly. Some games, including ones that are not resource-intensive like Overwatch, are practically unplayable due to severe frame-drops.

I’m trying to diagnose the issue and have a couple of theories. Could the remaining RAM stick have also gone bad? Is it common for two RAM sticks to fail simultaneously? Or could the system really be underperforming this much due to only having 8GB of RAM? Could there potentially be another issue at play, such as thermal throttling? He did report having dropped the PC from a few inches off the ground, so potentially that could have loosened the cooler.

My friend isn’t very tech-savvy, so I will be taking a closer look at the system myself. However if any of you have had a system be in a similar situation and know of any evident solutions, that'd be great. Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Without knowing anything about "less than 3-year-old PC" it's difficult to say but yes. 8GB is kinda too low nowadays. It's also slowed down by about 30-50% by not being in dual channel mode. Also you'll have to check his Windows and drivers, who knows what he added to it. Maybe some virus or other malware.

 

[little_me]

As you noted and as Countmike said, with described details, deeper analysis is hard if not impossible.
possible low ram, possible other installed junk, and so on.

Your theory about possible thermal throttling sounds valid to me though
due to drop, the sudden bump can and likely will crack/loosen the connection that thermal paste has with CPU/cooler and possibly GPU/cooler (these are usually more stable) but... without monitoring thermals, that is not possible to deduce.
Re-seating and applying thermal paste to CPU is an option or.. checking the thermals first and if problems appear, trying that first since it is by far easier than repasting GPU.

Thermal monitoring is not hard though.. can be done by many softwares from HWinfo to AMD to Intel to others...
HWinfo can log min/max temps and powerdraws of GPU/CPU and other parts of computer that has sensors for things (almost anything shown in HWinfo) so it is not bad one does it all option.

 

[Bob.B]

Recently, I sold my less than 3-year-old PC to a friend. The system was in perfect working condition at the time. However, a few days post-sale, the PC started experiencing severe issues, including Windows failing to launch.

Upon investigation, I discovered that one of the RAM sticks was faulty. I removed the defective stick, leaving the system with 8GB of RAM instead of the original 16GB. After this, the system booted up normally and seemed to function as expected. I gave it back to my friend promising to get him a new kit.

However, my friend has recently reported that the system is experiencing performance issues again. While games run at a decent base framerate, there are constant FPS drops. Additionally, tabbing out of games causes the system to slow down significantly. Some games, including ones that are not resource-intensive like Overwatch, are practically unplayable due to severe frame-drops.

I’m trying to diagnose the issue and have a couple of theories. Could the remaining RAM stick have also gone bad? Is it common for two RAM sticks to fail simultaneously? Or could the system really be underperforming this much due to only having 8GB of RAM? Could there potentially be another issue at play, such as thermal throttling? He did report having dropped the PC from a few inches off the ground, so potentially that could have loosened the cooler.

My friend isn’t very tech-savvy, so I will be taking a closer look at the system myself. However if any of you have had a system be in a similar situation and know of any evident solutions, that'd be great. Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

It might be a good idea to reseat all cables/plugs/cards.
Load up a temp monitor prog and see if something is out of wack.
Run a ram test to make sure what you have is working.

 

[SkyNetRising]

However, my friend has recently reported that the system is experiencing performance issues again. While games run at a decent base framerate, there are constant FPS drops. Additionally, tabbing out of games causes the system to slow down significantly. Some games, including ones that are not resource-intensive like Overwatch, are practically unplayable due to severe frame-drops.

That is to be expected after you drop ram capacity from 16GB to 8GB.
Low ram condition will have severe performance penalty.

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Thrashing (computer science) - Wikipedia

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