Is my CPU all to blame?

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MatthewThomasWadling

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Jul 1, 2014
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Okay, just got back into playing PC now, and have a bit of an issue with FPS, in most games.

Before i go on, here is my spec :

ASUS GTX660 2gb DDR5 OC
AMD FX4300 3.8GHZ quad core
BioStar A960D+
8GB 1333mhz Ram
500W PSU
1920x1080 AOC 23" LED monitor

Windows 7 HP 64bit


Okay so the issue is, before i got back into games i had a GT220 1GB DDR3 card, and i used to run everything on low, with good FPS in stuff like WoW, and Guild wars, it ran CS:GO on low very well too.

Got a GTX750 1GB DDR5 OC, and ran that for about 2 weeks before i worked out i had a faulty card, returned it and got another one, ran fine for another 2 weeks before i realised it was pretty underpowered. So returned it, and got a GTX660 2GB DDR5.

The card is much better, but as i was experiencing with the 750, i keep getting random framerate drops? as if the card or cpu is just dropping off for about 20 seconds then coming back?

For example in WoW, i can run Ultra settings at 40-50 FPS, but if i turn down the View distance i get more like 100 FPS, apparently view distance requires a more powerful proccessor, is this a reason for the low framerate? as my friend who has an i5, and a 660, runs wow 100 fps on ultra pretty much everywhere!

In other games too it does tend to have FPS drops but not so severe, fortunately, my brother has the same PC, so i tried my 660 and HDD in his PC, but its exactly the same!

Anyone has any ideas please let me know i am totally baffled!

Thanks :)
 
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genz


I'm not raging. I'm trying my best to answer a question :lol:

I know I'm an Asshole. I try my best, thank you!

If I said my stuff after you said yours then why was this post made before you had even come to the thread?

"This is all wrong. His cores are hitting 55C when they idle, it's not his CPU. CPU's only throttle when they overheat. Look a little harder before you advise next time. His lags are most likely coming from a slow HDD. That is why the speed of the CPU is going down to 1400mhz: There...
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You seem to be on the right track with what you said about the V/C -HD Radeon's or the other NVidia, But you forgot one thing, it's the way it is meant to be. Think back, who owned NVidia before they obtained AMD, so in logic what would be the best match. I have been building since 1983 and back then it was explained to me that, you should never mix, as it almost never works out - well most of the time, unless you really no what you are doing, and you almost always have some small problem that just P...s one off, like this chap is having. It would seem to me, this chap is suffering from hand me downs syndrome, and trying to keep up with Jones's. Unless you really know what you are doing, always never mix, NVidia @ Intel, AMD @ Radeon HD, is number one rule, Number two is Power supply should always be half again than the recommended min for the V/C. Every thing else comes with experience.
 
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It is totally normal to get this in WoW, yes the view distance will cause massive fps drops. During cataclysm release, the visual upgrades brought to wow totally, i mean it killed graphic cards. Cards that were giving good fps in frozen choked to death in WoW.

Understand this, you do not need to have the maximum distance view, i discovered i dropped 25 fps just by increasing the slider by 1 marker. If you are a heroic raider like i was you only need max raid boss area view nothing more.

The mechanism is simple, if you put more distance thinking that it will just allow you to see far, you are going at it real wrong, increasing view distance makes more particles, more clutter, more physics, more shadows and well more everything appear. It is not just stuff like background made a bit blurry like old movies, NO! it is the map itself and all of its contents being revealed and shown to you.

So to conclude, there is nothing wrong with your setup at all. Also on side note, viewing angles, places you look at in the game, you see fps drops randomly in a great many places, thats how the map is and many other games are the same. Rest assured, just fiddle with your settings a bit and find your just fit.

2 things that utterly tear at your card in wow, shadows and distance. Everything else no problem.
 
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Sorry to break your egg, but lol just so lol. I must say that comment is just awesome. I won't tell you why, but ive always been achieving great results mixed hardware ever since cpus like duron p4 celeron etc with agp 4x,8x you name it. And the chap is not suffering from hand me downs, if you ever had issues with mixed intel amd nvidia hardware, it just means that you just slapped some stuff together and it didnt work. You didn't actually take the time to actually prepare to make it work simple as that. Besides i wouldn't be the first person to say that to you, so many people all over the world can tell you that this compatibility issue is just bs.
 
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Ok i will reiterate. NOTHING!!!!! is wrong with your pc. There are two things that are causing fps drop at the precise moment that you are looking in the distance moving over your mouse. All those texture details andshadows particles and all the bla bla that comes with it, has to be loading, do not think that playing a game is only CPU-GPU related.

First your RAM... dude 1333 for gaming, no good at all, get 1600 with CAS 7-8.
Your hdd you did not list, so i do not know what rpm and what is cache amount on it. So if you have a 5400rpm western digital caviar green HDD like me to play games you will get this. you will need and upgrade pal.

So these two will fix your problem, well not totally fix but you will see a rather impressive improvement. Get 1600 RAM at CAS 7-8, and get a 7200rpm HDD or if you dont want to, get a 120gb ssd at around 60 bucks and go wild.
 
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As i have said before. Please ignore all the people here who are treating WoW like it's Crysis and just reading your specs and saying your FX CPU is weak. It's not, because WoW doesn't need much CPU.

Look, take it from someone with CPU authority, if your CPU is Idle it is becasue it waiting on something else. If it was at 25% I might say it's bottle-necked on a single thread, but it's not. The reason it is stalling is that it is waiting for the data it needs to process and the reason that is happening is that you do not have a fast enough HDD.

I doubt a defrag will make a huge amount of difference but it should make a little. Make sure you have over 15% of space and use Buy a small SSD for $60, hell borrow one and try it. I know I'm right.
 
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WoW, especially with high draw distance, is more or less dependent on single thread performance. What's likely happening is the CPU is occasionally getting overworked, causing lag spikes due to a single core getting overburdened.

The HDD shouldn't be a major factor since with 8GB of RAM installed, there shouldn't be much (if any) paging being done, and thus, very little to no HDD activity.
 
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My friend, it is a standard power saving feature, i can play crysis 3 without issue with my Phenom 2 powered down to 1600 through normal AMD power saver. THIS IS NOT A PROBLEM! if you buy amd and do not understand its features, do not listen to random blabla please. It just does that because at this point it is not processing any data, why should a cpu of this generation run at full power all the time when not processing data? Whoever just randomly told you that this is a problem should just stop commenting.

 
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You are only partially right, why is a game that looks so simple more than 30 gigabyte? LoL. You really think that a 5400 rpm drive will not choke? I did state this up there, i had this too while playing all the time, i was even doing heroic 25 with that. You just need to find the right view distance setting for you. If you really want to see a far away mountain peak that much ok, otherwise just lower the setting.

And again 1333 ram, please if you really want more performance on this kind of ram, either you check for overclock possibility on the ram or buy better ram. You want smooth gaming 1600 cl8 minimum.

 
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With 8GB RAM, the map data will stay in the OS' disk cache and the HDD effectively drops out of the equation altogether once the area is loaded. I remember how annoying that was back in WotLK when I had only 4GB RAM in my E8400... upgrading to 8GB helped a lot with flight stuttering.
 
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you could say this for WOTLK, but since cataclysm nope. I am saying all this in this thread from experience. 5400 rpm for gaming NO. 1333 ram for gaming NO. You will get fps drops it is unavoidable with these 2.

More ram and an SSD will fix his problem, Having more ram will allow for faster loading due to the size of the game, he can also build a ramdrive if he wants to mitigate loading time even more. SSD read write time will improve his loading and data processing time by so much he will not see any fps drop or stuttering due to level loading.

He did mention he had this in most of his games, i still have this with most of my games too due to my 5400 rpm drive, i have replaced 1333 ram with 1600 and it had a huge impact. Well anyways i have said everything that needed to be said for his issues. Good luck, if you want to waste money and buy a new platform to keep getting the same issue it is up to you.
 
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I was still using my Core2 with 8GB DDR2-800 during Cataclysm and that was still working perfectly fine.

The HDD has no impact on performance once zone data is loaded in RAM since the HDD does not get accessed anymore. And I have done worse things than run WoW off a 5400RPM HDD: try a 100Mbps LAN share... load times are brutal but once data is cached into local RAM, it is perfectly playable.
 
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Understand that not the whole game is cached, there are way too many places and too much data that loads and reloads, also there is seek time to take into consideration it is not just about the rpm. You can run wow off 5400rpm never said you couldn't but if you take time to understand the op, you would notice. The op is trying to use max view distance, in this instance lets say he is on ground and looking straight ahead, there is no problem he will see what his max view give him for what is in front until there is terrain collision like mountains or trees etc which are everywhere on wow. So now he just looks up, and gets an fps drop for 3--4 seconds, it is because as of the moment he started looking up, the drive starts to seek the data and read it to be displayed like a bird in the distance, or a world boss somewhere on top of a mountain. Now if it doesn't find the data in the cache it has to now write it, to be read which will create additional lag. It is not much but people who do not understand the concept will find it annoying and an issue. If he did the same on a 7200 rpm drive with improved read/write/seek he would see better result. And would barely ever get this problem on an SSD. And varying on the setting, each time new particles, details shadows etc is loaded carying from viewing angle, position and many other things. There are certain things that are set in the data cache which are there to improve loading time yes, but it doesn't mean that the whole game is there, else you would be having a 30GB cache which is nonsense.
 
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Thankfully, when playing interaction-intensive parts of the game like raids and heroics, which are the two things that usually matter the most to WoW players, the "too many places" are reduced down to one, namely wherever they are *now*, and that one place that actually matters easily fits in the 3-4GB spare RAM that should be left on a 8GB system running little else.

For most normal movements, the game's prefetch usually does a decent job at smoothing things out. I can't say I remember any particularly unpleasant disk-related lag playing Cataclysm. Can't say much about MoP since I never tried it on my C2D and my current system with 32GB RAM would not be a fair comparison.
 
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Yes that is why i did mention, in my first reply about view distance in raiding. But i went according to op post on view distance. If he wants to play like alexander the great ok he will have issues with that ram and hdd. In contrast if he will just raid most of the time, then he just has to reduce a few settings. Mainly shadows and view distance.

Just as i mentioned that i had same issues with view distance on my 5400 rpm hdd, reducing it reduced lag spikes in fps and increased my fps greatly and thats on the card that i am still using.
 
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Hey guys: I think all these tips are really good, I just wanted to throw in one side item that might also help a bit. It's a non-technical solution, but lately I've found that Razer's free "Razer Game Booster" app does a good job of dynamically killing any background apps that you don't need when you're gaming. That might at least reduce a bit of the overall system stress. You can tell it not to kill your monitoring tools when it runs.

Personally, I used to be a huge AMD fan...and lately, not so much. Intel's been kinda good to me. Funny how these things sometimes flip--in a year or two I might be saying the opposite again. :)

Anyhow, either way best of luck to our OP in getting better performance.
 
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Okay, it's evident people are incapable of this so I will reiterate in simple words for the simple minds among us.


LOOK AT THE SCREENSHOT (THE PIC BEFORE THE LINKED ONE ON PHOTOBUCKET), THE CPU IS COMPLETELY IDLE.

IT IS THUS NOT THE CPU. STOP LETTING YOUR BIAS DOMINATE YOU.

THIS IS WOW NOT CRYSIS.

Hope you understand now.



Edit: For all the people with more complex minds out there. WoW is a 30GB game. As a result, it uses a streaming engine. A streaming engine doesn't load a single environment like a level into memory and then work from memory, it loads the logic of each item in and then streams the models, textures, shaders and such from the hard drive, using the RAM as a cache. This is very much needed as and mount, item, and piece of armor can appear on any level and if it didn't operate like this it would need to hold massive amounts of potentially useless object data. This is also a holdover from the old days of the engine when there was absolutely zero possibility that the level you were on would fit on the lowest spec computer playing WoW.

Increasing the draw distance does increase the CPU load, as it requires the CPU to keep tabs on more objects, but it is an integer load, and AMD is very good at integer loads (1 AMD Integer unit is slightly faster than 1 i7 INT, it's the FPU's that suckl).

What it also does is put more stress on the streaming engine. LOTS more stress. The streaming engine now needs data from the HDD faster, as whenever you chance your field of view, the CPU counts all the objects within range of the draw distance (which is where the quoted argument comes from) and then proceeds to fetch them from RAM or if they are not in RAM, your HDD. Your stutters are coming from that taking too long.

You need to either up your RAM, then deal with the stutters first time round each map (as the level models are moved into RAM cache), or get a small SSD and stop worrying about stutters full stop.
 
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You are right in what you have said, So long as you know what you are doing. In this case, as you said " put some parts together and it didn't work" to put some parts together you should of said to match some parts. The M/B mentioned was built for the 1090t CPU. The FX- was designed for the 990-FX chipset with only some versions of the 980- chipset suitable to run the FX- CPU to it max, EG; Asus 980TD-USB3 ver;3 only, yes the ver;2 will work but, not as good. The FX-4300 needs 1866 MHz RAM to get the best from it, as per recommendation buy AMD, and the GTX660 V/C requires 23W on the first 12v rail, Or a mIn; 550w continue output. As for which type of card, NVidia or HD-Radeon it comes down to one personal choose, or, one prefers. If you match the CPU with the correct chipset, and the correct RAM for the CPU,( as per recommended by AMD) you will have a good foundation, then it no longer matters which V/C you use NVidia or HD-Radeon.
 
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😀 lol why did you compress all that i said in one post.
 
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Stop being childish. With or without your post I would have written the same. Someone directly quoted me and I replied. We both have the same point anyway, do you really want to act like a 5 year old and argue over who made it first, because if you do then look up and see (it was me).

I already said (very early on) the correct answer, and you gave something *like* an explanation of it, but your prose was weak and you made no effort to relate what I had said about CPU performance not being a factor to your point. You were quite happy to state it was HDD with zero explanation, but then fail to actually outright explain your case so the non-technical gamer can understand. You do that when everyone else is actually explaining their reasons (even if they are wrong) and nobody will listen to you.

A better question is "Why did you expand all that I said to 3 posts of offtopic RAID crap and but then fail to actually answer OP concisely?" (Because RAID doesn't majorly improve seek times and without SSD seek times you will still get lag spikes).

 
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dude serious why are you raging? im not the one that talked shit to you above. What a douche dude. You said your stuff after i already said all of it. Now i make a simple joke and you act like a douchebag? retard really.
 
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I'm not raging. I'm trying my best to answer a question :lol:

I know I'm an Asshole. I try my best, thank you!

If I said my stuff after you said yours then why was this post made before you had even come to the thread?

"This is all wrong. His cores are hitting 55C when they idle, it's not his CPU. CPU's only throttle when they overheat. Look a little harder before you advise next time. His lags are most likely coming from a slow HDD. That is why the speed of the CPU is going down to 1400mhz: There is nothing for them to do whilst they wait for the data they need to be transferred into RAM.

If it's not that, then download MSI Afterburner, and use the visualization to look at you GPU load. The CPU is in the clear if it is 55C and idling on lags. It should be maxing out.

Anyone that is talking badly about Cool and Quiet is either newish and has Power Settings in Control panel set to power saving, or is experiencing a bug that I KNOW does not exist in WoW. Not to mention your power usage for the CPU will go up around 450% in general use without cool and quiet."
 
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