GTX 970 Low FPS

[BradleyPayne10]

Hi! I have been having troubles lately with my Asus Strix 970. I purchased it back in January and after running benchmarks on Passmark, its scores were great! But recently, I've been noticing troubles with the card. After running another Passmark test, it only scored about 4500 in 3D Graphics.

In games such as Borderlands 2, I sometimes drop down to 30 or lower FPS in the most intensive scenarios.

I have tried many solutions such as reinstalling the newest driver, as well as installing the old 344.11 driver from September, an neither solved the issue. I've used Asus GPU Monitor, and it seems as if the card is typically running at about 90% load during the testing, and while gaming usually does not go above 55 degrees. I've also tried reinstalling Windows, and it seemingly made no difference.

Thank you so much in advance for all of your help! I will try to answer questions as quickly as possible, and please feel free to ask! Thanks again for your help!

Specifications:
GPU: ASUS Strix GTX 970 OC
CPU: AMD FX-8350
RAM: 16 GB DDR3
HDD: 1 TB WD @ 7200 RPM
SSD: Samsung 840 Evo 250 GB
PSU: 750w ThermalTake
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

 

[damric]

There's a couple possibilities.

1) Your CPU is likely choking on the game engine causing FPS dips. This is normal, but faster CPUs like Haswell i5 handle that a bit better.
2) Your Thermaltake PSU might be a PoS. What model specifically and how old is it?

Passmark is rather useless for estimating gaming performance. Try 3DMark, Unigine, or Catzilla.

 

[BradleyPayne10]

There's a couple possibilities.

1) Your CPU is likely choking on the game engine causing FPS dips. This is normal, but faster CPUs like Haswell i5 handle that a bit better.
2) Your Thermaltake PSU might be a PoS. What model specifically and how old is it?

Passmark is rather useless for estimating gaming performance. Try 3DMark, Unigine, or Catzilla.

I believe the model number is TR2 TRX-750M, and it's about 4 years old. However about 6 months ago I ran Borderlands 2 using a Phenom II 1100T and a GTX 580 with the same power supply and it ran at around 65 FPS on average. As for measuring game performance, I will try 3DMark soon.

 

[damric]

Your 1100T was arguably a better gaming CPU, so your previous rig may have had hgiher minimum FPS despite having a more powerful graphics card in your new rig.

The TR series is kind of sucky though.

IT will be interesting to see if your benches score normally for that hardware.

 

[BradleyPayne10]

Your 1100T was arguably a better gaming CPU, so your previous rig may have had hgiher minimum FPS despite having a more powerful graphics card in your new rig.

The TR series is kind of sucky though.

IT will be interesting to see if your benches score normally for that hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike:

Graphics Score: 11441
Physics Score: 7814
Combined Score: 2797
This Score: 8298

Maybe I'm mistaken, but it seems these scores are relatively accurate. If so I've also heard that PhysX runs pretty poorly on newer cards, so maybe that's why it ran smoothly on my 580 but drops on my 970? I'll try running the game with it disabled and see if that improves FPS.

 

[damric]

Yes your scores seem good.