High end machine underperforming?

[aleks_vec]

Hallo, I have bought my first gaming rig as second hand, I was very pleased by the performance, but recently when more of my friend upgraded their rigs with similar parts, I found out mine is underperforming since they have often the same or even better fps on worse rigs.

My parts are:
CPU: i7-6700 (non-K) *Note: I have unparked the CPU and boosted to max boost speed by default around 3.9 GHz
GPU: MSI Armor 1080 8GB (Not overclocked)
RAM: 2*8GB 1600mh
Motherboard: GA-B150M-DS3H DDR3
PSU: Seasonic 520W 80+ Bronze
Monitor: 27inch 2560x1440p (QHD) 144hz *Note: i have also a second monitor

I have tried some benchmarks:
https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/13624680
Firestrike: https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/32156000?
Time spy: http://www.3dmark.com/spy/5724509

This is my results from playing with settings on different games and I want to note that my CPU is never near 100% load. and my power plan is on high performance as well as the Nvidia control panel.

Rainbow Six Siege: ~120fps on Medium settings, without AA. If I decide to go to max settings my Vram is around 4Gb, 100% usage but the performance hammer down to around 30 fps

War Thunder: max 16xanisotropy HQ TAA, SSAA: None- I get around 120 fps but at the moment I enable SSAA it goes down to 30 as well. again- 100%usage around 3.5 VRAM usage (My friends are getting 160 with SSAA on max and Celeron + 1060)

League of legends: 140 FPS while in battle on max settings: (my friends are getting above 200 with i5 and 1050ti)

BF1: ~60FPS on Max settings, ~100 on medium settings

Escape from Tarkov: ~120 fps high settings with AA off and anisotropy lowest possible

Rising Storm 2 Vietnam: ~120 FPS on max settings

CSGO: ~120-130 FPS no matter how I change the settings

Hunt Showdown: 60 FPS on Low preset, around 40 on high settings.

GTAV: ~50 FPS on max settings with around 5gb VRAM usage. If I turn off FXAA and MSAA i get around 80 and if I turn off anisotropy I get around 120-160 FPS.

PUBG: ~90 FPS on max settings

The temperatures of the CPU on heavy load are around 60C and the video card is not going over 76C so thermal throttling is out of the equation.
What I have noticed is that any game that uses more than 5GB of the VRAM is running with low fps, and almost all of the games I play have above 100 fps on light load. none of the games even get close to 8GB VRAM usage, so running out of memory shouldn't be the problem. I'm thinking about either something is bottlenecking the system and i can't find what or i have something defective/dying into my rig.
I have tried to reinstall drivers and windows but no improvement. I want to point out that this is my first gaming pc and I'm not sure what I need to expect from this setup, but if my friends have better FPS with worse rigs that should point a problem in mine.

 

[winks42]

It’s a bottle neck. Your CPU is bottlenecking the GPU. Also would recommend a better psu. Oc your gpu on XOC or MSI afterburner and make a better fan curve. I recommend getting a better CPU to really unleash the beast.

 

[outlaw2001]

considering it isn't a K processor, it will bottleneck the GPU a tad bit. sky lake processors are a bit cheaper on the 2nd hand market, so i recommend going for a K processor, or go to 7th or 8th gen all-together. as for the psu, that's probably whats hurting your performance, get a 650 or higher, i'd recommend a corsair 750w fully modular.

 

[aleks_vec]

How is even possible for i7 CPU with almost 4Ghz to be a bottleneck and celeron+ 1060 to push out more fps than me on not demanding game like War Thunder, also I play in 1440p resolution so this should even increase the load on the GPU and therefore the CPU should perform better. According to the PSU, some of the biggest brands like omen and hp sell prebuilds like mine with the exact same PSU so I thought that would be just enough to feed non-overclocked GPU and CPU.
Also, i saw a video where they compare 6700 to 8700 and the 6700+1080TI was pushing over 180FPS on R6 on max settings, where i get 30 fps on the exact same setting. so that cant is just as simple as a bottleneck.

 

[ahmadhijazi0]

How is even possible for i7 CPU with almost 4Ghz to be a bottleneck and celeron+ 1060 to push out more fps than me on not demanding game like War Thunder, also I play in 1440p resolution so this should even increase the load on the GPU and therefore the CPU should perform better. According to the PSU, some of the biggest brands like omen and hp sell prebuilds like mine with the exact same PSU so I thought that would be just enough to feed non-overclocked GPU and CPU.
Also, i saw a video where they compare 6700 to 8700 and the 6700+1080TI was pushing over 180FPS on R6 on max settings, where i get 30 fps on the exact same setting. so that cant is just as simple as a bottleneck.

Is this at 1440p? I'd be surprised if it's caused by a cpu bottleneck. You said cpu load is never a 100% but what is the actual usage range? 30-50%? 60-80%?

 

[aleks_vec]

Depends on the game, but it's around 60-80% the only game that hit 100% is Hunt, but this is really CPU demanding and unoptimized game.

 

[winks42]

Try to oc your GPU if your CPU is some how not bottlenecking

 

[ahmadhijazi0]

Try to oc your GPU if your CPU is some how not bottlenecking

How is this going to help? CSGO fps should be 300+ at 1080p with stock GTX 1080 & 6700 (non k). OP is getting 130fps. Something else is going on.

 

[aleks_vec]

Try to oc your GPU if your CPU is some how not bottlenecking

Well i have already tried that, there is an increase of not any more of 5-10 FPS and the card is performing worse in the moment i start to put a heavier load on it like example: R6 i have 120 FPS on low to medium settings, in the moment i turn AA on it dies to 20 FPS
This pretty much happens to any game in the moment i turn all the settings especially AA the performance go down in the sewer
https://gyazo.com/532f259af0f0a138e0bc56106c528506-AA off cpu 64% usage- 100 usage on the GPU ~5GB VRAM used
https://gyazo.com/2c09c059215f05baacbe1c329089b08d- AA on CPU at 37% usage- GPU- 100% ~7GB Vram used
https://gyazo.com/d6e76a7b6d7afd9b52d395a8d2c17687 - This is a video where it shown that same CPU + 1080ti get 190FPS at AA - on, i get low 20s with the same setting. this clearly means i have a problem i can't seem ti find since the benchmarks cant catch the problem but occur only in games.

 

[ahmadhijazi0]

I am not sure if you've done that already. The nvidia drivers might be out of date since this is a second hand pc. I suggest uninstalling all existing nvidia drivers and installing the latest from MSI or nvidia. If that doesn't help, I would turn my attention to the psu. Perhaps borrow one that is rated for higher and run some tests.

 

[aleks_vec]

I am not sure if you've done that already. The nvidia drivers might be out of date since this is a second hand pc. I suggest uninstalling all existing nvidia drivers and installing the latest from MSI or Nvidia. If that doesn't help, I would turn my attention to the psu. Perhaps borrow one that is rated for higher and run some tests.

I'm usually keeping Nvidia drivers up to date. however i tried installing older drivers, and i guess i made full reinstall to the drivers with my windows reinstall. Tbh PSU should be fine since it's 80+ I have been guaranteed 330w continues power. And my rig should be somewhere around there, ~350watt usage, but i doubt it will act like that and lower FPS instead of going a blue screen or at least heating up the PSU due to high consumption (which is not hot at all)

 

[tenukpcgame]

I have a gtx 1060 6gb and i use 500w psu. Ur have 1080 card and use psu below 500w. I want to upgrde to 1070 ti and they force me to upgrde the psu because 500w cannot handle 1070ti performance. Idk if this true or not. just telling.

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-3600979/power-supply-gtx-1080-8700k.html

Anyway, ur ram ddr3?

 

[aleks_vec]

I have a gtx 1060 6gb and i use 500w psu. Ur have 1080 card and use psu below 500w. I want to upgrde to 1070 ti and they force me to upgrde the psu because 500w cannot handle 1070ti performance. Idk if this true or not. just telling.

Anyway, ur ram ddr3?

I have made a mistake, my PSU is 520Watt which means i have 416Wat continuous power guaranteed and yes, the guy that has to build this PC have cut corners in cost and he has decided to use b150 ddr3 mobo which is prob the cheapest motherboard that can be used for this processor and just 520W of power. Not to mention when i bought the pc i was scammed and i was supposed to be 7700 no 6700 so rn I'm trying to find what is wrong with that system. tbh I don-t believe my system is using more than 320-350w at full load since if the consumption is more than it can supply, i should get random crashes and blue screens, which i haven't experienced even after I overclocked the GPU to 120%. Also if that is the problem i belive the score would be lower in the benchmark tests as well, not just when im gaming. But in any website and calculator, i use it does say i need at least 520 watts for such a system, but i will probably try to find 600Watt PSU and try gaming again.

 

[aleks_vec]

Anyone has an idea already? CPU bottleneck is not a possible solution to this, OC the card won't do anything since I should have double the frames I have and the 520W is ok. My only idea is either the video card have been used for mining and it's fucked or the RAM is too slow since its 1600mhz while my card boost to 1900mhz core clock and 5300mhz on mem clock.

 

[ahmadhijazi0]

Ram speed makes a 10-15% difference but it won't half the fps, so I would rule that out, especially that in benchmarks you're doing fine.

At this point, my only guess is that the comparison is faulty. Are you sure your friends are playing at 1440p and not 1080p? Since benchmarks are fine, you must be playing on a different resolution/settings than your friends.

 

[aleks_vec]

Ram speed makes a 10-15% difference but it won't half the fps, so I would rule that out, especially that in benchmarks you're doing fine.

At this point, my only guess is that the comparison is faulty. Are you sure your friends are playing at 1440p and not 1080p? Since benchmarks are fine, you must be playing on a different resolution/settings than your friends.

They are playing on 1080p, but they still max out settings i cant. in the moment i max out r6 i go to 20 fps while they play on ultra with AA on with 100+ fps with 1050ti witch is much worse card than mine. Also, bearly hit 6gb of the VRAM usage, so that I'm playing on higher resolution shouldn't impact that much the performance on such a game. I can confirm the benchmarks are not faulty since my friends are getting similar FPS with 1060.

 

[cbrocks06]

Ram speed makes a 10-15% difference but it won't half the fps, so I would rule that out, especially that in benchmarks you're doing fine.

At this point, my only guess is that the comparison is faulty. Are you sure your friends are playing at 1440p and not 1080p? Since benchmarks are fine, you must be playing on a different resolution/settings than your friends.

They are playing on 1080p, but they still max out settings i cant. in the moment i max out r6 i go to 20 fps while they play on ultra with AA on with 100+ fps with 1050ti witch is much worse card than mine. Also, bearly hit 6gb of the VRAM usage, so that I'm playing on higher resolution shouldn't impact that much the performance on such a game. I can confirm the benchmarks are not faulty since my friends are getting similar FPS with 1060.

playing at a higher resolution does impact the performance

 

[aleks_vec]

Ram speed makes a 10-15% difference but it won't half the fps, so I would rule that out, especially that in benchmarks you're doing fine.

At this point, my only guess is that the comparison is faulty. Are you sure your friends are playing at 1440p and not 1080p? Since benchmarks are fine, you must be playing on a different resolution/settings than your friends.

They are playing on 1080p, but they still max out settings i cant. in the moment i max out r6 i go to 20 fps while they play on ultra with AA on with 100+ fps with 1050ti witch is much worse card than mine. Also, bearly hit 6gb of the VRAM usage, so that I'm playing on higher resolution shouldn't impact that much the performance on such a game. I can confirm the benchmarks are not faulty since my friends are getting similar FPS with 1060.

playing at a higher resolution does impact the performance

Yes, it does, but not that much to make 1080 perform worse than 1050ti in between 1080 and 1440p.

 

[boju]

1440p is a bit more demanding over 1080p but not so much more that load balance toward gpu is significant. 4k would be significant. At 1440p, top end GPUs can manage high frame rates so the cpu still needs to pre-render each of those. Seeing you're getting reasonably high fps, the cpu work load is also increased.

Graphics drivers do have a lot to answer for. Some may give you better performance and others break. Could be a few versions you've tried which all have the same flaw. Just don't know until something changes i guess.

Try this driver, im currently using this with a 1080Ti and performance was better than 417.35 i was on. https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4758

Other miner things to avoid is don't use Geforce Experience to install driver or optimise games. Better to do those yourself.

If you try the beta driver which is a fully functional driver addressing issues 417.35 had, use DDU first in safemode and use the Nvidia's clean install option to avoid Windows 10's generic driver interfering if you haven't disabled automatic driver updates.

Is Gamebar switched off?

 

[aleks_vec]

1440p is a bit more demanding over 1080p but not so much more that load balance toward gpu is significant. 4k would be significant. At 1440p, top end GPUs can manage high frame rates so the cpu still needs to pre-render each of those. Seeing you're getting reasonably high fps, the cpu work load is also increased.

Graphics drivers do have a lot to answer for. Some may give you better performance and others break. Could be a few versions you've tried which all have the same flaw. Just don't know until something changes i guess.

Try this driver, im currently using this with a 1080Ti and performance was better than 417.35 i was on. https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4758

Other miner things to avoid is don't use Geforce Experience to install driver or optimise games. Better to do those yourself.

If you try the beta driver which is a fully functional driver addressing issues 417.35 had, use DDU first in safemode and use the Nvidia's clean install option to avoid Windows 10's generic driver interfering if you haven't disabled automatic driver updates.

Is Gamebar switched off?

Game bar is off. tried this driver but no change at all, windows updates are on and the first time I installed Nvidia drivers where from the website.

 

[boju]

Do you use Geforce Experience to optimise?

 

[boju]

Have you tried disconnecting 2nd monitor?

 

[aleks_vec]

Have you tried disconnecting 2nd monitor?

I did not use gforce experience for anything, have tried dc second monitor no change whatsoever.

 

[boju]

Lowering graphics too much can lessen the workload from the gpu and you don't want that. What resolutions do your friends play on? If they're running on 1080p (assuming 1080p because they have lower spec gpu), have you tried doing the same and configuring graphics settings the same as theirs?

Also i noticed in your Firestrike score, memory is listed as 1x 16GB, is that correct? Because you said you have 2x8GB in your OP, just curious because other results from other systems do account for multiple dimms.

This is yours, https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/32156000?

Someone else's; https://www.3dmark.com/fs/10386090 under General/Memory lists as module 1 and 2 where your results looks like it's reporting one? Might be just a glitch.

Dual channel would help a little bit but unless you actually tried it (if your system only does have 1 stick of ram) couldn't say for sure.

Not sure what else to suggest yet.

 

[aleks_vec]

Yes, my ram is on dual channel, 1600mhz DDR3 2X8GB on slot 1 and 3, I have tried the exact same settings on the same resolution, they are usually having the same fps or even more. on some games, they get way more FPS.