GTX 680 FTW+ 4GB Random Framerate drops

[kastrenzo]

My system is pretty much brand new, I've only had it for two weeks or less.

CPU: Intel i7 3930K Six Core 3.20 GH *3.80 GHZ Turbo* w/ Thermaltake Frio Heatsink
Mainboard: ASUS Rampage IV Extreme X79
PSU: Cooler Master RS-A00-80GAD3 Gold Ultra Silent Pro 1000W
GPU: EVGA GTX 680 FTW+ 4GB GDDR5 PCI-E 3.0 DirectX 11
Storage: OCZ Vertex 4 128GB SSD, Western Digital WD2002FAEX 2TB Caviar Black
RAM: Corsair Vengeance 16GB DDR3 4x4GB @ 1600Mhz
OS: Windows 7 Home Professional 64bit


The problem I have been having is that several if not all of my games have been having "FPS Trampolines", This machine is more than capable of running nearly any computer game at max settings, and when I first brought it home it would run games on max settings with steady 60+ FPS

Ex
BF3 - 80-120 FPS
Planetside 2 - 70-100 FPS
ArmA 2 - 60-80 FPS ETC.

Over the past few days many if not all of my games will start up fine, but within 5 minutes or less, usually less, the FPS drops to about 10-20% of it's norm, for example Planetside will drop from 70 to 11, and them jump right back up it's norm, only to drop again 10 seconds later. making it utterly unplayable

Sometimes I'd think the game would just need time to unpack textures, But I've let them run for up to 20 minutes and no difference

It's even been doing it on less graphically intense games such as Mass Effect 2, Originally I thought by running a less intense game for a few minutes I could "warm it up", but it seems that rebooting the machine is the only solution that is doing anything, and even then sometimes it takes 2 or 3 reboots to make any effect

Some other notes
- Drivers are updated to latest, Performed multiple clean installs
- On one occasion I was getting 30 FPS and no higher, I restarted the machine and got a Mobo post error tone, the GPU Error tone, restared it a second time and it hasn't happened since
- Until yesterday I had been using the ASUS GPU Tweak program to monitor my fan speed and temperature, but the tool itself is an overclocking tool and I was told that it caused problems with others so I got rid of it*
- Last night when I was showing a friend the Battlefield 3 game, when I shut the game off the video card "freaked out", the display turned off and the fan on the video card went up to like 80-100% and I had to manually power the machine off before it blew up.

- After the fan incident I was still able to play planetside 2 with the normal 80FPS or so for a few hours so it didnt seem to do anything to the computer, it was just a scare.


Incase I haven't made my issue or question clear, what can I do to fix this bouncing FPS issue, it's very annoying. Since I have an SSD and bootup time is less than 30 seconds, restarting is more of a chore than anything else, but given the amount of money I spent on this machine I shouldn't be having these issues. After all for the first week this machine ran like gold.

 

[kastrenzo]

Before I shut down ASUS GPU Tweak, the card's idle temp was around 30, and in games it would go between 50 and 70. and fan duty would usually max out around 55% when it was at 70C

I already have a tool to monitor my CPU temperature, my Motherboard came with a tool to monitor several things, strangley enough it doesnt monitor anything to do with the GPU though, hence I started using GPUTweak.

On my old systems I used CPUID PC Wizard, but when I ran it on here, the computer Bluescreened when trying to gather information on the GPU, The first time I ran it it flickered for a minute then popped up with my specs, temperatures, etc, then the second time I ran the program a few days later, BSOD. So I've uninstalled that program.

also as I was saying, sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't, today it's working fine, ran some of the mentioned games and they were working no problem.

 

[kastrenzo]

I looked at MSI Afterburner and it looks like a carbon copy of ASUS GPU Tweak.

One thing I did notice when I had GPUTweak was when the framerate was jumping up and down, the GPU Usage on the GPUT Monitor was also jumping, it was going from 99 to 50-80 and then back up to 99. 99 Being the regular Periods

 

[kastrenzo]

I updated to 310.90 drivers and it worked for about 2 days now it's back to doing it again. this is the second time I've rebooted the machine since I started today

anyone else?

 

[djangoringo]

Some cards like that one can throttle at 70c-80c, try a custom fan profile, set the fan speed for more(65% or more)...

 

[kastrenzo]

Some cards like that one can throttle at 70c-80c, try a custom fan profile, set the fan speed for more(65% or more)...

I was doing that orginally, I had it increase by 10 percent for every 10 degrees, but the tool I was using *which was right from my Mobo manufactuerer* I'm pretty sure it was what caused some of these problems in the first place, not to mention that retarded Fan explosion that happened about a week ago, where it went from 30-40% to 100% in about 1 second.

the card rarley goes above 70c as well, 75 is usually it's peak even in high performance video games like ArmA II

 

[kastrenzo]

So a mini Update/bump

I tried MSI afterburner just to see if it was any different, it appears to be a carbon copy of GPU Tweak. I'm wary of using it because I'm pretty sure it was OC tools that caused this in the first place

I ran planetside 2, and the game was averaging 60-80 FPS, Afterburner didn't register anything out of the ordinary.

GPU Usage was usually at 99%, although it wasn't loud, or particularly hot. the Fan speed was around 50-55, and the temp was normally at 70, highest peak was 83

mind you this test was taken after like 3 restarts today so I didn't experience the FPS bug when running MSI AB.

 

[kastrenzo]

I've pretty much been talking to myself in this thread, but thanks anyway for the people who did reply

I'm fairly certain I've pinpointed and fixed the issue


I should have noticed it weeks ago when I was using ASUS GPU Tweak, I never had GPUT, Or Afterburner set up to monitor VOLTAGE, I noticed that when all my graphs *along with FPS* Were going up and down, that the voltage was also going up and down

I'm by no means a hardware geek , but its pretty obvious that if power isnt steady performance wont be either

yesterday I selected "force constant voltage" on Afterburner, and I thought that fixed it, but this morning I started it again and it was back to it's old ways

I opened up my ASUS AI Suite and started looking at tools, originally I was looking at Probe II, But then I found that the EPU tool was most likley what is causing it, since it had an option to automatically downgrade Vcore voltage to save power

EPU is completley a**-backwards, setting it to high performance mode actually gives you less performance than just automatic, I turned off the downgrading option completley, started up a game, and it magically started working like normal with no reboots required

i traced the voltage issue with MSI afterburner, normally my GPU would run 1.125 or slightly higher volts when it was running normally, but it would keep dropping to like 0.987 and then go back up, when it would drop, is when I get my lag.

 

[pianodomkop]

I've pretty much been talking to myself in this thread, but thanks anyway for the people who did reply

I'm fairly certain I've pinpointed and fixed the issue


I should have noticed it weeks ago when I was using ASUS GPU Tweak, I never had GPUT, Or Afterburner set up to monitor VOLTAGE, I noticed that when all my graphs *along with FPS* Were going up and down, that the voltage was also going up and down

I'm by no means a hardware geek , but its pretty obvious that if power isnt steady performance wont be either

yesterday I selected "force constant voltage" on Afterburner, and I thought that fixed it, but this morning I started it again and it was back to it's old ways

I opened up my ASUS AI Suite and started looking at tools, originally I was looking at Probe II, But then I found that the EPU tool was most likley what is causing it, since it had an option to automatically downgrade Vcore voltage to save power

EPU is completley a**-backwards, setting it to high performance mode actually gives you less performance than just automatic, I turned off the downgrading option completley, started up a game, and it magically started working like normal with no reboots required

i traced the voltage issue with MSI afterburner, normally my GPU would run 1.125 or slightly higher volts when it was running normally, but it would keep dropping to like 0.987 and then go back up, when it would drop, is when I get my lag.

I have an asrock 970 pro3 r2.0 motherboard, i have the same problems and the same gpu usage drops, what do you recommend me? the ai suite doesnt work for me