[SOLVED] FPS Drop in all my games After installing Corsair AIO

[JonLeeroyIX]

I recently installed a new Corsair AIO to replace my CPU air cooler that bit the dust, and at first everything was fine, then i noticed a massive slowdown in all my games. I can typically run most games on Ultra without any frames dropping, so this is very frustrating. Everything worked fine before I did this. I saw on another thread to do a fresh install of windows, which seemed to fix the issue for a couple weeks. But today I've noticed I can no longer play things like ESO, or any type of 1st person game without it being so choppy and horrible. I'm pretty sure I have installed the AIO correctly, I even watched a step by step tutorial for it. No clue what to do? Any ideas?

Specs:
MOBO: H81 Pro BTC
CPU: i5-4460S 2.9 GHz Quad-Core (It's a <Mod Edit> board and CPU, I'm working on it lol)
PSU: 550 watt Antec
GPU: GTX 1070
Ram: 32gb of DDR3
512gb ssd and 2tb HDD

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

Hey there,

I guess it's possible there's some link because of the new AIO, but given it's worked okay intermittently, the it could just be a coincidence, and is hiding another issue.

When you get low FPS/stuttering, what kind of CPU/GPU usage do you have? Is anything overheating? Set up MSI OSD to show during gameplay, and set it to show CPU usage/temps/clockspeed, same for GPU, and also system ram usage.

You might run CinebenchR23 for your CPU, and watch the temps and clockspeed with something like HWMon or HWInfo.

 

[Phaaze88]

Take a table fan, aim it at the mobo VRM area, and blast away. Test again with that fan running, and see if it still happens, because my first guess would be VRM thermal throttling.
AIOs do not provide as much direct airflow over VRM as an air cooler does, so if the VRM was just barely getting by with the stronger flow from the air cooler...

The second guess is software, particularly Corsair's iCUE, which they've made mandatory in order to operate their AIOs.
It's eating up extra system resources from your old quad core, and probably triggering cpu limited scenarios more often.

 

[JonLeeroyIX]

Hey there,

I guess it's possible there's some link because of the new AIO, but given it's worked okay intermittently, the it could just be a coincidence, and is hiding another issue.

When you get low FPS/stuttering, what kind of CPU/GPU usage do you have? Is anything overheating? Set up MSI OSD to show during gameplay, and set it to show CPU usage/temps/clockspeed, same for GPU, and also system ram usage.

You might run CinebenchR23 for your CPU, and watch the temps and clockspeed with something like HWMon or HWInfo.

Whenever the frames are dropping CPU is at 100% and GPU stays normal around 40

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

AIOs do not provide as much direct airflow over VRM as an air cooler does

Good point!