Let me just preface this post by saying that I am not a gamer, have no use for a high end gaming card and that I am well aware that the card I'm talking about is not considered a good gaming card by any stretch of the term.
I had my rig built primarily for audio production, and chose a budget card that would be decent enough for everyday use - browsing, using a DAW, some photo editing and the occasional light use of Adobe Premiere. So the HD 7750 sounded ideal. I'm not the kind of guy who would obsess over the fps performance of games - I really have no interest in that.
But over the last few months I had started noticing poor performance of my DAW (Sonar Platinum) while producing music. I was getting clicks and pops, and someone suggested putting Sonar in "conservation mode," which would only update the display at intervals (typically you have things like audio meters updating constantly). To my surprise, the clicks and pops almost entirely went away, and the few that remained only happened when the display updated. This suggested to me that something might be up with my graphics card.
So out of curiosity, I downloaded 3DMark to see what kind of score it would give me, so that I could compare it with other scores from the same card. I wasn't expecting any kind of smooth rendering at all, but I was actually surprised at how bad it was.
The overall score given was 513. This was comprised of:
Graphics Score: 513 (test1: 2.95fps, test 2: 2.5fps)
CPU test: 5237
My CPU is an Intel Core i7 4930K and the machine has 32GB of RAM. My OS is Windows 10, 64-bit.
3DMark thus rated my card as giving a lower performance than the average laptop. I've looked at other scores for the same card online and have seen in the region of 2200.
Since then I've been through the usual routine - cleaning the drivers using a driver cleaner, installing the latest drivers from AMD etc. Rolling back. Re-seating the card. Nothing improves its performance. Temperature readouts seem ok: in the region of 40-50C. The fan seems to run at around 40%.
So I guess what I'm asking is: is there any way to tell for sure if this card is faulty or dysfunctional in any way? What other things could be causing the card to perform so badly? I'm tempted to go out and buy another card, but I'm worried that if the problem is not the card but some other aspect of my rig, I'd be wasting my money.
Any thoughts?
I had my rig built primarily for audio production, and chose a budget card that would be decent enough for everyday use - browsing, using a DAW, some photo editing and the occasional light use of Adobe Premiere. So the HD 7750 sounded ideal. I'm not the kind of guy who would obsess over the fps performance of games - I really have no interest in that.
But over the last few months I had started noticing poor performance of my DAW (Sonar Platinum) while producing music. I was getting clicks and pops, and someone suggested putting Sonar in "conservation mode," which would only update the display at intervals (typically you have things like audio meters updating constantly). To my surprise, the clicks and pops almost entirely went away, and the few that remained only happened when the display updated. This suggested to me that something might be up with my graphics card.
So out of curiosity, I downloaded 3DMark to see what kind of score it would give me, so that I could compare it with other scores from the same card. I wasn't expecting any kind of smooth rendering at all, but I was actually surprised at how bad it was.
The overall score given was 513. This was comprised of:
Graphics Score: 513 (test1: 2.95fps, test 2: 2.5fps)
CPU test: 5237
My CPU is an Intel Core i7 4930K and the machine has 32GB of RAM. My OS is Windows 10, 64-bit.
3DMark thus rated my card as giving a lower performance than the average laptop. I've looked at other scores for the same card online and have seen in the region of 2200.
Since then I've been through the usual routine - cleaning the drivers using a driver cleaner, installing the latest drivers from AMD etc. Rolling back. Re-seating the card. Nothing improves its performance. Temperature readouts seem ok: in the region of 40-50C. The fan seems to run at around 40%.
So I guess what I'm asking is: is there any way to tell for sure if this card is faulty or dysfunctional in any way? What other things could be causing the card to perform so badly? I'm tempted to go out and buy another card, but I'm worried that if the problem is not the card but some other aspect of my rig, I'd be wasting my money.
Any thoughts?