High end-ish pc running much slower than it should

[DannyDorito]

PC specs:
GPU: MSI GTX 970 Armor OC
CPU: Core i5 4460 3.2 ghz
PSU: Corsair CX600
HDD: ST1000DM003
RAM: 2x 8gb DDR3 1600mhz
OS: Windows 10 Pro 64bit
MOBO: Gigabyte H81M-S2H

So ive made a thread about this before, but i still cant find an answer. Ive since then upgraded my ram (a guy on battlefield 1 told me it would solve all my problems and said 8gb is the bare minimum these days) and ive seen no increase in performance what so ever. The games i want to focus on are Fallout 4 and Battlefield 1 mainly. Ive seen footage online of people playing these games with pretty much 60 fps at all times on ultra settings with the EXACT same rig as me and the same drivers, game version, OS etcetera whereas i cant get anywhere past 40 fps in a regular game environment and completely unplayable in a firefight, and this isnt on ultra, it doesn't matter what settings i run the framerate stays the same (with slight, barely noticeable variation).

Now the juicy bit, i use rivatuner and msi afterburner to monitor hardware while in game and my GPU pretty much hovers below 50% in these games whereas my CPU is always stuck at 100% no matter what. I have tried LITERALLY EVERYTHING, not even joking. Disk defrag, disk check, antivirus scan, messing with gpu's core clock, modifying CPU boost in BIOS, complete pc reset, cleaning case, turning up fan, increasing voltage, reinstalling drivers, you name it, I've done it. I've had this problem for 2 and almost 3 years now and havent gotten a single bit of progress since then. Oh and my temps are fine as far as i can tell, in the most demanding parts of a game my GPU doesn't get anywhere above 60 degrees and my CPU never goes above 50. The only things i could thing of now is that my motherboard only has PCI-E 2.0 and the 970 is meant to run on PCI-E 3.0 but ive also heard that PCI-E is backwards and forwards compatible and should decrease performance at all. And the very last resort is that my cpu / gpu / mobo is somehow defective. Im planning on buying a new cpu, the Core i7 4790, but im really scared that it will still have somehow worse performance. At this point I pretty much think I wasted about £1000 on hardware that doesnt work properely.

Thats about it, Please, if you have anything to say that could possibly help me apart from the basic stuff that everyone knows it will be more than appreciated.

 

[GhislainG]

How fast is your CPU running at full load? What power profile is active? When not gaming, is it really idle, i.e., very low utilization? What does your HDD performance look like in Task Manager, Performance, Disk 0 (or whatever number is assigned to it)? I'm asking because your CPU may be busy waiting on I/O, but that doesn't help with gaming and other applications.

 

[DannyDorito]

How fast is your CPU running at full load? What power profile is active? When not gaming, is it really idle, i.e., very low utilization? What does your HDD performance look like in Task Manager, Performance, Disk 0 (or whatever number is assigned to it)? I'm asking because your CPU may be busy waiting on I/O, but that doesn't help with gaming and other applications.

http://imgur.com/a/id5JU

• ^ Screenshot of my task manager while my pc is completely idle (Google chrome, discord, steam, razer synapse, wallpaper engine and gyazo are the only programs that are open)
  My power profile is on high performance and always has been

Im not sure what you mean by how fast my cpu is running at full load, do you mean the usage or the utilization in task manager or something else?

 

[GhislainG]

I unselected the solution because it isn't yet resolved.

Could you post a picture of the following in the performance tab: CPU, Memory and Disk.

Your system is very busy at idle; for comparison with my desktop (i5-4590) where I have 2 VMs and several applications running, my CPU is 2-3 % busy and my Disk (SSD) is 0 % busy.

Are you sure the hard disk isn't the issue?

 

[DannyDorito]

I unselected the solution because it isn't yet resolved.

Could you post a picture of the following in the performance tab: CPU, Memory and Disk.

Your system is very busy at idle; for comparison with my desktop (i5-4590) where I have 2 VMs and several applications running, my CPU is 2-3 % busy and my Disk (SSD) is 0 % busy.

Are you sure the hard disk isn't the issue?

EDIT: Sorry, the other screenshot was made right after I closed down utorrent so it was taking a bit to go down. This one is more accurate for idle:

http://imgur.com/a/IZ26Z

• 
  ^ Performance tab (not sure what that spike is about)

I ran seagates tools on my hard drive and nothing came up on a full scan so i dont know, my hard drive is pretty much 95% full though (not of junk files or potential viruses, just large programs and games), i dont have an ssd though, just a hard drive. But even if my hard drive had an issue would it really affect the framerate? Because i dont really get any stuttering, just low frames.

 

[GhislainG]

Your CPU and disk utilization are abnormally high (a SSD as the boot drive would be better). I also noticed that you have much higher than expected Ethernet activity; what are you downloading? That can keep the CPU and the hard disk busy. Your system never seems to be idle; it behaves like a server.

 

[typhoon123]

are you seeding your torrents? because if you leave them on that will slow down network speed.

 

[DannyDorito]

Sorry for the necro but after years of not using this pc to its full potential i finally found the solution. It was as simple as updating my BIOS. Now everything runs just as it should, over 100+ fps boost in overwatch and other CPU bound games. Its crazy because nobody ever told me that updating my BIOS would have any effect on performance.