Question CPU Dropping to Exactly Half It's Frequency Randomly

[alannm37]

Hi all, first time posting here in 5 years! Can't believe it. First, I will tell my problem and then what I've tried to do and what I think should be done going forward.

I bought an HP Pro 3500 about a month ago, it came paired with a GT 710. I have a lot of experience buying older 3rd Gen Office Systems and upgrading them bit by bit.
Current Specs:

i3-3240
GTX 970
HP Pro 3500 Motherboard (Foxconn 2ABF) + Case
Silverstone Strider 700W Modular Power Supply
Kingston 120GB SSD
WD 500GB HDD

Getting at the issues.... I wanted to play the newer game Call of Duty Warzone so I upgraded the GT 710 to a GTX 970. I have played 2 games successfully and all other times the game would crash without any error. But I notice that my frames would be 60/70 and then drop to 30/35, exactly halved. I also noticed that the game sound would also stutter, if that helps in any way. What I've tried to resolve this:

1. Reinstalled Windows
2. Ensure all drivers are up to date.
3. Perform Windows tweaks to reduce background CPU and Memory usage.
4. Verified the game files.
5. Renaming the game executable after starting the game (randomly found solution).

None of the above worked. So I started to look at the clear bottleneck of the system, the processor. I monitored the CPU usage while playing Warzone as well as other games, and noticed that both the core frequencies are dropping to exactly 50% of their max speeds, before jumping back up again. I started to think that I have found the issue (CPU Speed drops causing crash in Warzone. My other games stutter and have FPS drops). I then disabled all power-saving options by scouring the BIOS as well as enabling the Windows 10 Ultimate Performance mode. I was going to take the processor out and reseat it and apply thermal paste to see if the problem would be resolved but temps are not an issue so what else could be casuing it?

Other solutions, maybe just upgrade the processor to an i5 3rd gen? (Want to avoid this due to the worlds current pandemic)

I have included a pastebin link which contains the Monitoring Data from HWMonitor after playing 1 game of League of Legends as well as trying to play Warzone, with a crash. The max temps seem fine, but that CPU frequency minimum value on both cores should not be 50% of the max speed of the cores. Please have a look. If there is anything else I can provide to help, then please let me know.

PasteBin Link: https://pastebin.com/LDB1ufk6

Thanks so much!

 

[Calvin7]

Another person with similar setup reported the stock fan profile was not aggressive enough to keep GPU cool in that HP case. This however was easily fixed by applying a more aggressive fan curve in MSI afterburner, resulting in GPU Boost kicking in although at the cost of a slightly louder system.

 

[alannm37]

Another person with similar setup reported the stock fan profile was not aggressive enough to keep GPU cool in that HP case. This however was easily fixed by applying a more aggressive fan curve in MSI afterburner, resulting in GPU Boost kicking in although at the cost of a slightly louder system.

I have created a custom fan curve and overclocked the GPU, the first thing I did when I got the card. I have ordered a new CPU and extra RAM so that will probably fix the issue.