Computer performance is awful all of a sudden.

[rkinney6]

Welp. Here I am again, having issues with my build. I'm just going to go through a huge story of my build to see if any of you guys can spot an issue. First off: The components. I bought, at first, these items: FX 6300, 7770 ASUS 2GB GDDR5, Biostar a960d+ (ugh), Rosewill RedBone, a random 500GB Harddrive, Team Dark 8GB RAM. All right. So when I first got the build, it was all performance, blowing almost every game out of the water with insane graphics and framerates (the first time I have had to use V-Sync. Very impressed.) This was followed by an insanely annoying screeching noise in audio that could only be avoided by using my HDMI audio, which I found okay. After a while, I started to notice small spurts of bad performance in games. After a while of looking it up, it was thermal throttling. I then bought a new motherboard to treat myself, an ASRock 970 Extreme4 (Open Box from NewEgg), and a cooler to stop all of the issues, the Corsair H60 (which I bought refurbished.) I installed all of these, expecting all of my issues to go away. Nope. My gaming performance is even worse than before, getting only around 50 FPS on low settings in Battlefield 3 at 1360x768 on a 64 player Metro server. I used to be getting around 120 FPS on ultra around there, which, once again, was insane to me. I also thought about standoffs, because although this may seem silly, when I first built my computer, it didn't come with standoffs, so I recently bought them and installed them. No. Still terrible performance. A response would be greatly appreciated, as I am desperate for this computer to be fixed so I can get back to gaming!

Things I have tried:

• 
  Resetting Windows. A lot. Tried a ton of different versions.
  Rebuilding.
  Antivirus
  Overclocking slightly

None of these fixed my performance issues. Thanks again! I will try everything you guys suggest!

 

[capt_taco]

When you say "resetting" Windows, do you mean formatting and then a clean install? That's what would solve software issues.

Have you checked the temperature of your graphics card, not just the CPU? If that's the component that's being throttled, you could be off on a wild-goose chase with the CPU cooling.

Lastly, what kind of power supply and how old.

 

[rkinney6]

When you say "resetting" Windows, do you mean formatting and then a clean install? That's what would solve software issues.

Have you checked the temperature of your graphics card, not just the CPU? If that's the component that's being throttled, you could be off on a wild-goose chase with the CPU cooling.

Lastly, what kind of power supply and how old.

Oh sorry, I forgot about the power supply. It is a CX 500 (probably around a year old). I'm fairly sure my graphics card temperatures are low, but I'll go check right now with a game of Battlefield 3. I'll tell you in a little bit!

 

[rkinney6]

When you say "resetting" Windows, do you mean formatting and then a clean install? That's what would solve software issues.

Have you checked the temperature of your graphics card, not just the CPU? If that's the component that's being throttled, you could be off on a wild-goose chase with the CPU cooling.

Lastly, what kind of power supply and how old.

Okay, ran the game for a while. I'm getting around 50-55 degrees celcius on my card, without even setting my fan speeds to the max. And also, for the resetting windows part, I haven't been completely formatting, all I did was install a different version of windows and deleted windows.old

 

[capt_taco]

OK, well the GPU temperatures are nothing to worry about, so that's probably not it.

If you want to be absolutely sure about software problems, I'd recommend doing a complete format and reinstalling Windows, or better yet download a program like Boot & Nuke, burn it to a disc and write zeroes to the entire hard drive, then reinstall Windows. Now THERE'S a way to be sure any software problems or viruses are gone.

About that hard drive ... what model and how old? It may be advisable to download a drive health testing utility from the manufacturer and give it a run. If it's on its way out, that could be able to tell you.

Finally - did you verify for sure that the heat problems are gone on the CPU? What kind of temps are you getting now?

 

[gity69]

Agree with capt_taco (lol) complete windows re-installation + install newest drivers for all of your components (including motherboard audio and stuff like that). The hypothesis I have based on what you have said is that your cheapo motherboard was dying you replaced it without doing a complete windows refresh causing your current software conflicts (just a guess). Get back to us after you do a OS refresh and let us know how its going.

 

[rkinney6]

OK, well the GPU temperatures are nothing to worry about, so that's probably not it.

If you want to be absolutely sure about software problems, I'd recommend doing a complete format and reinstalling Windows, or better yet download a program like Boot & Nuke, burn it to a disc and write zeroes to the entire hard drive, then reinstall Windows. Now THERE'S a way to be sure any software problems or viruses are gone.

About that hard drive ... what model and how old? It may be advisable to download a drive health testing utility from the manufacturer and give it a run. If it's on its way out, that could be able to tell you.

Finally - did you verify for sure that the heat problems are gone on the CPU? What kind of temps are you getting now?

So... I nuked it. It took a very long time, but it's been nuked. I installed Windows 7 x64, and got myself the newest driver from AMD's Website. The issue still remains. I did find something though, in Battlefield, when looking at less intensive areas, the FPS is higher than when I am looking at intensive areas, but it didn't used to be like that. It's almost like something won't render as much as it should as fast as it could. Not sure what model the harddrive is, it's a year old, and it's 500 gigs. That's all I know. And for CPU temps, I'm getting like 19 degrees celcius when not under load, so the H60 is definitely doing it's job.