Good components, lame gaming performance. What's wrong? :(

[empirebeige]

Here's my problem: I've built quite a good computer for gaming (I think), but it has performance issues ranging from mild to serious. This stuff has haunted me for almost two years and is driving me nuts.

In 2013 I first upgraded my computer and started gaming again. I had an AMD FX 8150, a Radeon HD 7870 and 16 gigs RAM. The only part that I kept from my old setup was the HDD, from 2009. I played first person shooters (Battlefield 3 & 4, Insurgency), and the frame rates were inexplicably low.

I couldn't find the reason for this, so I did another round of upgrades and switched the mobo and CPU. Eventually I got a new GPU as well. This is what I have now:

• 
  Intel Core i5 4670K
  EVGA Geforce GTX 970
  16 GB 1333 MHz RAM
  Asus Z87 Pro motherboard
  Standard 7200 RPM HDD
  Corsair CX 600W Plus Bronze PSU
  Windows 8.1 64-bit

Battlefield 4 runs pretty smooth on Ultra, but in maps where there are large building the FPS drops to the 40s.

Red Orchestra 2 (another shooter) runs at around 60 FPS on Ultra, but it suffers from constant microstutter that is very annoying.

IL2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad (a flight sim) manages 60 FPS on average settings only when there is nothing going on. When there's some action, the FPS drops to the 40s or even 30s.

These above two worst offenders both run DirectX 9.0 (not 11). Don't know if that has something to do with something.

Insurgency and Planetside 2 run very well, or at least as well as they should (Planetside 2 being quite a CPU hog).

In addition to upgrading all these components, I've reinstalled Windows, tried Razer Game Booster, switched the memory chips around. Cinebench gives a score that is in line with what I should get with these components. CPU temperatures in game are 50 to 60 degrees. GPU temperature maxes out at 70. I analyzed the hard drive with HD tune, and the results didn't seem out of the ordinary.

Someone suggested a while ago that the problem might be with my power supply. It's around 2 years old. But it should be able to handle what I have, right?

I don't know what to do anymore with this. It feels like I've spent almost as much time trying to get games to work as actually playing them. Please help!

 

[empirebeige]

A little bit more details: I played all of these games with the same setup that is on the list, but with the Radeon HD 7870. Switching to the significantly better GTX 970 did not remove most of the performance issues (FPS dips in BF4 and IL2, stutter in RO2).

 

[herrwizo]

Someone suggested a while ago that the problem might be with my power supply. It's around 2 years old. But it should be able to handle what I have, right?

In theory, yes. In practice, it depends on your luck with the specific unit.

CX series is meant for office use, definitely not for a high-performance gaming rig (especially not with overclocking - and your CPU is K series, so my guess is you OCed it like most people would).

It is not the power rating that is the issue here, it is the quality of components in that PSU. They are below average, and this can lead to all sorts of issues. Your rig needs 100% stable power all the time for everything to be in order.

Before getting any further into this issue, you need to replace it, since it also looks like this PSU is the only common denominator (not being replaced) since your problem started.

Get Seasonic, XFX, Antec HCG, EVGA B2, Corsair RM. A quality 550W unit will be more than enough, but you might want to go for 620-650 to have more headroom.

Finally, what CPU cooler are you using? Hope it's not the stock one? From the temperatures you listed I guess not, but you never know...

 

[empirebeige]

I haven't overclocked the CPU actually. I'm using a Zalman CNPS7X LED to cool it. So far I haven't overclocked because I prefer to have the fan running in quiet mode.

Is there a way to find out whether the PSU is failing me, using software for instance?

 

[herrwizo]

The only way you can be sure is to swap the thing with a better quality unit and test.

 

[empirebeige]

Okay. I'll look around. I noticed that someone is selling an Antec HCG-620M 620W apparently in good condition. This, I suppose, is something that would do?

 

[herrwizo]

This is a great PSU. I would still purchase new - who knows how long has he/she been using this one and under what conditions. And reasons for sale are also something to be considered...

 

[empirebeige]

Ok. The seller said that the PSU's been under light use. There's still plenty of warranty left on it, so I went for it. Let's see if it will do the trick.

 

[tsnor]

before you rip it up, suggest you goto youtube and look at similar build playing the games you like and note their framerate.

PSU is not apt to cause a drop in frame rate or "constant microstutter "

update: grab some benchmarking tools. Run games that have a built in performance test so that you can compare framerate with exactly the same inputs for the same settings and game scenario.

When you are done you will discover that your PC is underperforming because something is not right (your current assumption) or that an excellent video card like 970 is not strong enough to give you the experience you want. You system has more CPU than GPU and is not $$ balanced towards gaming.

 

[JustGetOwned]

Make sure all of your drivers are up to date and use some programs like MSI afterburner, HWmonitor and CPUz, CINNEBENCH, etc to check whether your CPU and GPU are performing right. Also take a look in your BIOS and manually set all the settings so that everything workst properly. Maybe you have used a program like AI suite, this can mess up your performance a lot. It did to me and it was very hard to get it out of my system again.

 

[empirebeige]

Thanks for all your help.

Update: I switched my PSU to the Antec HCG-620, and I tried playing my games. Don't see much of a difference.

There might have been a slight improvement in the flight sim IL2 in certain situations, but the FPS still often drops below 40 on average settings. Red Orchestra 2 still stutters and has significant FPS drops. Battlefield 4 still has issues on some maps, though many users have said that those maps are poorly optimized.

So overall, putting in another power supply definitely didn't fix the issues at hand. I was really hoping this would have done it

before you rip it up, suggest you goto youtube and look at similar build playing the games you like and note their framerate.

There are many gaming demonstration videos on Youtube with similar setups, but very few of them have an FPS indicator running. Still, I'm pretty sure that my computer should be able to handle a nearly 4-year old game like RO2 without any problems.

Make sure all of your drivers are up to date and use some programs like MSI afterburner, HWmonitor and CPUz, CINNEBENCH, etc to check whether your CPU and GPU are performing right.

Cinebench gave results that are normal for this setup. I ran Unigine Heaven on 1080p, Extreme preset (8xAA). I got 51.1 FPS and a score of 1298. FPS ranged from 21 to 110. During the benchmark I monitored the components with MSI Afterburner. The GPU clock and mem clock stayed on the same level, hence there seems to be no throttling.

Also take a look in your BIOS and manually set all the settings so that everything workst properly.

I've tried the max performance settings in BIOS, and also the optimized default settings.

 

[JustGetOwned]

The GTX 970 is a pretty high end card right? My asus r9 290x gets 1900 score on unigine heaven extreme preset. Thats a pretty big difference. Go to your windows configuration screen, go to enery settings. Make sure this is set to performance. This could be limiting your gpu.

 

[JustGetOwned]

I just found this article: http://tweakers.net/nieuws/101518/gebruikers-gtx-970-dienen-aanklacht-in-tegen-nvidia-wegens-prestatieproblemen.html
It is in Dutch but it might be worth reading it with google translate. Consumers are sueing Nvidea for bad performance on gtx 970.

 

[empirebeige]

I ran Unigine Heaven again with max performance settings, and the result was pretty much the same. I suppose it's not very high, but it seems that it's hard to compare results in an exact way, since the CPU also has an effect etc.

Now I have noticed that Red Orchestra 2, my favorite game, almost always starts out smooth. But if I play it for a while, it will start to stutter, and it stutters very badly as the playing goes on. What might be the reason for this? My CPU and GPU temperatures are 60 to 70 degrees at most during gameplay. Crappy memory or something?

 

[JustGetOwned]

Before you waste any more money on diagnosing the problem, take it to a store. Maybe a buisness that build custom PCs or something similar nearby. This will cost something too but not as much as changing all of your components one by one to see if it makes a difference.

 

[Bossyfins]

Someone suggested a while ago that the problem might be with my power supply. It's around 2 years old. But it should be able to handle what I have, right?

In theory, yes. In practice, it depends on your luck with the specific unit.

CX series is meant for office use, definitely not for a high-performance gaming rig (especially not with overclocking - and your CPU is K series, so my guess is you OCed it like most people would).

It is not the power rating that is the issue here, it is the quality of components in that PSU. They are below average, and this can lead to all sorts of issues. Your rig needs 100% stable power all the time for everything to be in order.

Before getting any further into this issue, you need to replace it, since it also looks like this PSU is the only common denominator (not being replaced) since your problem started.

Get Seasonic, XFX, Antec HCG, EVGA B2, Corsair RM. A quality 550W unit will be more than enough, but you might want to go for 620-650 to have more headroom.

Finally, what CPU cooler are you using? Hope it's not the stock one? From the temperatures you listed I guess not, but you never know...

The current RM line from corsair is acutally crap.

Just stick with XFX, Antec, SeaSonic, or EVGA

 

[Bossyfins]

Actually, may I ask when you play games, what is your CPU usage and GPU usage at.

During games..

 

[JustGetOwned]

I'll do a test when I get home.

 

[Bossyfins]

I'll do a test when I get home.

Are you the op alt account

O.O

lol

 

[JustGetOwned]

Whats op alt? Overpowered alternative?

 

[mdocod]

When you are done you will discover that your PC is underperforming because something is not right (your current assumption) or that an excellent video card like 970 is not strong enough to give you the experience you want. You system has more CPU than GPU and is not $$ balanced towards gaming.

You seem to be entertaining a delusion that there is a hidden performance characteristic created by the "balance" of CPU and GPU in a computer. I'm sorry to have to break it to you like this, but that is mystical sparkling gerbil droppings.

Performance originates with the CPU. A powerful CPU is required for good FPS in compute intensive games no matter what GPU is selected. An i5 haswell is a good CPU for high FPS gaming regardless of of GPU selection and visual quality goals.

It doesn't matter if you're playing games with a GTX460 on a 720P monitor or with a GTX980 at 1440P, if we want good consistent FPS on either, we have to use a CPU with strong performance in real-time workloads.

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Empirebeige,

It sounds to me like there is something wrong with your computer, either hardware or software wise, that is causing performance glitches and problems. There are lots of possible sources of these problems. Your performance problem obviously has nothing to do with the PSU (FYI: that could have been largely ruled out by running a torture test and observing rail voltages.) And of course, has nothing to do with a bogus theory about hardware balance (^^^ lol).

1. Make sure you're using a clean, direct from MS copy of Windows. No 3rd party modified installers filled with trashware. Set SATA controller mode to AHCI before installation.
2. Make sure you aren't installing or running any active virus/malware protection software. This can interfere with real-time workloads badly.
3. Make sure your motherboard chipset/audio/usb/ethernet/sata drivers are installed. ( http://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/Z87PRO/HelpDesk_Download/ )
4. Make sure your motherboard BIOS is updated... Did you know there have been 11 BIOS updates for your motherboard since release? Several of them mention performance and stability improvements in the notes.
5. Make sure windows power plan settings aren't set too conservatively. The power plan should be set to the highest performance modes available when diagnosing problems like this.
6. Make sure you have all windows updates installed and the LATEST stable GeForce drivers installed from nvidia.

What Specific RAM is installed in the machine right now (model numbers please!)? I get the feeling based on the way you have it listed that it may be a smattering of several different DIMM's or 2 separate kits. You may have memory access stalls and errors causing performance problems if the memory controller is trying to perform rank or channel interleave across mismatched DIMM's. This may be solvable by changing the physical arrangement of DIMM's installed, and which interleave functions are enabled in BIOS, as well as by using manual voltage, speed, and timings. It might be worth running memtest86+ or Prime95 blend testing for a few hours to see if either are generating errors or appear to be stalling.

 

[tsnor]

When you are done you will discover that your PC is underperforming because something is not right (your current assumption) or that an excellent video card like 970 is not strong enough to give you the experience you want. You system has more CPU than GPU and is not $$ balanced towards gaming.

You seem to be entertaining a delusion that there is a hidden performance characteristic created by the "balance" of CPU and GPU in a computer. I'm sorry to have to break it to you like this, but that is mystical sparkling gerbil droppings.

Performance originates with the CPU...".

Troll go read the balance selected for Tom's most recent build, an i3 coupled with an r9 280. Nothing mystical, just engineering. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/build-budget-gaming-pc,4065.html And nothing wrong with a CPU balance, I have that on my PC. Just need to have the right expectations which is what my append says.

 

[mdocod]

When you are done you will discover that your PC is underperforming because something is not right (your current assumption) or that an excellent video card like 970 is not strong enough to give you the experience you want. You system has more CPU than GPU and is not $$ balanced towards gaming.

You seem to be entertaining a delusion that there is a hidden performance characteristic created by the "balance" of CPU and GPU in a computer. I'm sorry to have to break it to you like this, but that is mystical sparkling gerbil droppings.

Performance originates with the CPU...".

Troll go read the balance selected for Tom's most recent build, an i3 coupled with an r9 280. Nothing mystical, just engineering. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/build-budget-gaming-pc,4065.html And nothing wrong with a CPU balance, I have that on my PC. Just need to have the right expectations which is what my append says.

The implication of the myth you are perpetuating here, is that empire would get better performance if he had an i3 instead of an i5.

Obviously, that's wrong.

Choosing to balance the budgeting of a machine to achieve the least objectionable compromise between performance and visual quality is normal, and there is no wrong answer to that balance, as everyone has different priorities and different workloads.

 

[empirebeige]

Thanks mdocod for your detailed suggestions.

What Specific RAM is installed in the machine right now (model numbers please!)

I have two 8 GB sticks of Kingston RAM (Kingston KVR1333d3n9/8g).

It might be worth running memtest86+ or Prime95 blend testing for a few hours to see if either are generating errors or appear to be stalling.

Yes, I will do a full cycle of memtest tonight and check the results. So far I've only ran it for an hour or two, but without errors.

I've also ran Prime95 for a while. There haven't been any stability issues, but the CPU temp goes really high (> 90 C), so I've had to stop the cycle after some minutes. This might be because I'm running the Zalman CPU fan in quiet mode, using a supplied regulator. In games the CPU temp is within reasonable limits, though (max 60 to 70 C).

I checked my BIOS version, and it is from June 2014. It seems that there have been only 3 updates since, and they are related to a couple of specific issues (overclocking optimization and HDD detection). An update is a little risky, so I'm not sure if it's worth doing.

 

[empirebeige]

The RAM sticks and HDD are pretty much the only components left from my original AMD FX 8150+ Radeon HD 7870 setup. I played Insurgency (a Source game) with that setup, and performance was abysmal. 30 FPS even on lowered settings. The funny thing is, though, that I sold the AMD FX + mobo to one guy, and the 7870 to another, and got absolutely no complaints about performance. So it's like, when I run whatever components on my rig, the output is below par.

1. Make sure you're using a clean, direct from MS copy of Windows. No 3rd party modified installers filled with trashware. Set SATA controller mode to AHCI before installation.

I have OEM Windows, originally 7 but updated to 8.1. I've managed to reactivate it when switching motherboards. About a month ago I did a reinstall, using Windows 8's built-in feature for that.

2. Make sure you aren't installing or running any active virus/malware protection software. This can interfere with real-time workloads badly.

I'm running Avast antivirus. Should I keep it in a passive mode?