My CPU bottlenecks the iGPU.

[Shektron]

Usually I'm the one helping people out on these forums, but I'm completely stumped by this issue I'm having.

So, a while back, I tried overclocking my iGPU, and of course failed horribly and reversed everything to stock. Since then, I had been having problems with my CPU temps, so after changing my faulty CPU cooler(more than once), the CPU temps are finally under control. But a very weird issue has now developed - my CPU bottlenecks its own integrated graphics. In games, my iGPU's usage almost never hits 99%, I don't think it even touches 90%.

I do have a dedicated graphics card, but funnily enough, it's worse than my integrated GPU. Guess who got duped by the hardware store :/ (I didn't know anything about PC Hardware back then).

CPU: Intel i3 4150
Motherboard: ASRock H91M-S1 Plus
Memory: 4 GB, generic RAM that somehow works
Video card: Nvidia Geforce 210 + Intel HD 4400
Storage: WD 1 TB HDD

 

[robax91]

1. If you aren't going to use the card, unplug it and set it aside.
2. In the bios, use the "reset to optimized default settings" option or "reset to default" then save and exit.
3. In windows, uninstall NVIDIA drivers. Then reset the computer.
4. Go to intel's website and look up your igpu's latest driver, install it using default options, try to select "clean install" if it has that option.
5. Reset PC a few times while checking for windows updates.

This should clean up any driver problems. If it persists, it would be from the game you are playing or hardware problems. When the GPU isn't being taxed but the CPU is, it means your CPU cannot output frames or calculate physics as fast as the GPU can render frames. The way to solve this is to raise the quality settings in game, increase resolution, or cap the FPS (so that the CPU only outputs a specified number of frames) then tweak settings in game around that.

 

[Shektron]

I do use the card - it is for my second monitor.

The latest drivers are already installed, but I'll check nonetheless.

By resetting the computer, do you mean reinstalling Windows?

 

[Shektron]

So, I installed the latest drivers. But I feel very stupid at this point - I had VSync on in all my games. But now I have a new problem to share. The reason I had turned on Vsync is because turning it off, in any game at all, gives me very weird artifacts and immense screen tearing - at under 30 FPS. And I have a 60 Hz monitor. So, I guess the bottlenecking is not the problem here. Can you figure out any reason for this? I turn off VSync, and the screen just goes wild - no matter what game it is, from Portal 2 to Rocket League to Life Is Strange. Any game at all, without VSync on is unplayable, no matter what the FPS is.

Thanks for your help so far.

Edit: Do you think I should start a new thread for this issue?