GTX 780 Ti Framerate drops dramatically in games

BZDraconian

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Mar 16, 2014
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I recently got a new computer with much better hardware.

16 GB RAM, Asus X79 Sabertooth MB, Intel Core i7 4930K at stock clock rates (for now) and EVGA GTX 780 Ti Superclocked with the ACX cooler.

For the most part it runs great but every once in a while if I've been playing for more than about 20 minutes, there will be a sudden and significant drop in framerate. This happened in Crysis Warhead (all settings maxed and 4X AA) and Skyrim (several high-def mods installed with ENB to provide stability because of the 3GB RAM , no fancy ENB though)

I have 1680x1050 resolution monitor (don't ask why I got a 780 with this 'tiny' monitor I just didn't feel like replacing the monitor just yet :p)

I have also been playing the Elder Scrolls Online beta, all settings maxed out, but I haven't had a frame-rate drop in that game. Seems stable at between 50-60 fps.

I'm about to run a Unigine Heaven benchmark, and my 3DMark 11 score was 14143

I have the latest drivers installed for the card (335.23) and motherboard.
 

OnkelCannabia

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Nov 9, 2013
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First things that come to mind is slight incompatibilities because of the age of those games or the fact that you are using mods and temperature issues. Warhead maxed out should work out easily. I was able to max it with much slower hardware. Your 3dmark score seems fine though. Observe your temps first and if that doesn't tell us anything we'll have to look further.
 

BZDraconian

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Mar 16, 2014
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I ran the Unigine Heaven 4.0 benchmark, maxed all settings out except I used 4X AA. I got a score of around 2100.

The GPU seemed to go up toward 70C, and I left it run for a bit to see if it went any higher.

In both Skyrim and Crysis the framerate dropped to around 10 and stayed there.
 

OnkelCannabia

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Hmmm, that is rather strange. 70c is OK. As long as it doesn't go much higher than 80c you should be OK. What was your CPU score in 3dmark? Is the CPU working as expected? I don't know about your Uniengine results. Optimally you would want to find some Uni benchmarks and model your settings after these benchmarks.
 

BZDraconian

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Mar 16, 2014
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CPU seems to be working fine and its temperature doesn't go above 40 even under heavy load - liquid cooled.

I should also note that I took the lazy man's way of transferring to my new system - first ran Sysprep, then reinstalled all the drivers for Windows 7 64-bit home premium. Didn't have to reinstall any other software. I'm not ruling out a clean install in the future but I might wait for Windows 9 or something.