New GPU slowing PC a LOT!

[Rayzer88]

Hi all I'm hoping someone can help me! Or my nephew to be exact

He's just bought himself a new GTX 970 graphics card and ever since installing his computer has slowed almost to a halt. He can't load even the most basic of games and even general computer usage is painfully slow.

He plays a lot of DOTA 2 which plays absolutely fine on his onboard graphics but since installing the new GPU, it won't even load, let alone play.

I've taken the gpu out and tried it in my system and it ran BF4 perfectly with gfx settings maxed. We just reloaded his computer without the GPU and it runs fast and smooth again, runs DOTA 2 fine.

I ran it in my machine with an i5 2400, 500gb ssd, 8gb ram etc..I was confident it would run fine

He is currently running:
i3 2120 3.3GHz
4gb DDR3 (9-9-9-24)
500GB HDD

While I suspect the processor is at fault I am by no means an expert! I was hoping someone could give us an idea what the problem may be, and the most cost effective way to at least get the system running (he is in college at the moment and funds are very limited)

Thanks in advance for any help you can give me!

 

[TommyTheTank]

You could try using DDU to uninstall and reinstall the drivers
Also check the temperatures, see how hot its running

That i3 is only a dual core and will be dragging that card down a lot, but it shouldn't be running that badly, he should really look into upgrading his cpu though

 

[dontlistentome]

Have you made sure the integrated graphics are disabled and the motherboard bios is set to use the PCI-express graphics card? Also, when you say the computer is running slow, you mean even just loading Windows? What are the specs on his power supply?

 

[Rayzer88]

Hey sorry for the delay. I forgot to mention that I did a clean install of the drivers, with only the most upto date ones installed. I checked the temps using speccy and nothing was out of the ordinary.

The bios on his computer was somewhat primitive and I wasn't able to disable the onboard graphics from there so I disabled it in system manager for now. I'm not sure of the details on his PSU but I do know he bought one new and it is 500w.

The computer is slow to load windows, slow waiting for any apps to open...just generally very sluggish...what I imagine it would be like using a pc running Windows 95 today!

 

[MusenMouse]

The CPU and 4GB of RAM are probably bottlenecking the system. I am not sure how games determine presets, but if it is doing it mostly off the GPU, I can see the computer loading very high presets, only to quickly hit a brick wall when it runs out of RAM and CPU processing power. Try opening up task manager when opening up DOTA 2 with the GTX 970 and look for the RAM and CPU usage.

 

[junkeymonkey]

if a 6 series motherboard [sandybridge] you may need a bios update to support these newer cards some may work, some need a bios update , some find no bios offered will support the cards and SOL .

look up [goggle ] like z68 with gtx 970 and see a lot on this

you maybe stuck with one of them anything under 900 series card only boards ???