I've had enough of this!

[Danoded]

I've had enough with all this! Every time I want to play a game I experience lag spikes and I don't even know why. I have a SAPPHIRE Radeon 7870 HD GHz edition and the GPU Usage keeps fluctuating when I play games making it unplayable for some time and happens constantly. For example in AC4 I'm playing on everything at ultra (except for AA) and I get around 40-50 FPS but then it starts to dip after two minutes of playing then the GPU Usage goes from 85 to 50 something and sometimes even 30-36! I monitor this using MSI Afterburner and it is starting to get completely out of hand. I've checked my CPU as well and that never reaches 100 and stays on the 60-70 mark so I honestly don't know what is wrong with my system. I have a 1TB HDD so I don't know what's the problem there. I have a 8GB of RAM so don't even say I don't have enough to game. I have a 500w PSU that has been working perfectly fine. I think the only reason may be because either my GPU or CPU is playing up. My CPU is an FX-4130 and that CPU can handle a lot of games easily. There is no heat issue since I monitor that regularly and never goes too high. I just want a straight forward answer on how to solve this issue that has been affecting me for months now which no one has been able to answer.

 

[manofchalk]

CPU bottleneck (its not that great, its not even a true Quad Core), and the things overheating, AMD chips shouldn't go above 62°C.

 

[rolandzhang3]

Please organize that big chunk of text into paragraphs, it's forum etiquette (it's understandable that you're frustrated)

For starters, have you tried uninstalling your GPU drivers (CCC) through control panel and ccleaner, then used driver fusion/sweeper to clean out the remaining leftover files and then doing a clean installation of whichever driver you were on?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXs3DHdbTUg

For an AMD CPU, reaching 70 degrees is pretty high so that would cause it to throttle, which would explain why you experience the frame dips mid-game, Intel CPUs start throttling at 90-100C

You could reapply some thermal paste or buy a decent aftermarket cooler like the CM Hyper 212 EVO/Xigmatek GAIA

 

[FALC0N]

He didn't mention CPU temperature. How do know its overheating?

 

[manofchalk]

He does, but its buried in that block of text.

I've checked my CPU as well and that never reaches 100 and stays on the 60-70 mark so I honestly don't know what is wrong with my system.

 

[FALC0N]

He's talking about cpu utilization. Not temps.

 

[rolandzhang3]

Woops, lol it'd still be a good idea to monitor your system temperatures and see how close it's reaching the TJmax of the CPU for instance

If it's not a temperature issue, then it'd most likely be with drivers (unless his original post from a while back states otherwise)

 

[Danoded]

My apologies to everyone for being so unprofessional in my writing. I was very angry at that time.

 

[coozie7]

It does sound like the CPU is throttling so check the temperature and fan speed under load (I like Speedfan or Realtemp but there is plenty of other monitors out there).

 

[rolandzhang3]

Haha your best bet would be coretemp for monitoring your FX CPU, setting up a fan curve in Speedfan would be a good idea too