Really poor FX8350 gaming performance. Advice?

[konadh324]

First off, specs:
FX8350 with no overclock
Sapphire Radeon R9 280x with latest stable drivers
Antec 620 high current gamer
Crucial Ballistix 8gb sport low profile ram
ASUS M5A99FX PRO R2.0 on 2051 bios
Fresh install of Windows 7 ultimate 64 bit
WD Caviar black 1TB with windows SATA driver <-- thinking that may be an issue.
Open air case

All temps are within spec with the CPU never going over 52c and the GPU rarely going over 65c.

Now to get to the point, I recently updated my PC from an Athlon 760k + msi A78M-E35 to an FX8350 and ASUS M5A99FX PRO R2.0 and to say I'm disappointed would be an understatement. The performance differences between the 2 setups are barely noticeable at all.

In Fallout 4 on high / ultra 1080p with godrays and AA off I'm struggling to stay above 45 fps everywhere outside, and I drop to the low 20s in Diamond city. Interiors being the only place where I have a solid 60 fps all the time. In BeamNG Drive I have regular drops to as low as 12-15fps regardless of graphics settings or resolution with only 1 vehicle being used. I went as far as putting everything on low and playing in windowed 720p and drops were still down into the high teens in BeamNG. I truly don't understand what could be going on because I see people with the same CPU + GPU with solid 60s in just about every game on ultra / high. And yes, I've deleted and reinstalled both games and verified the caches for both.

Any advice would be massively helpful, because as of right now I have a return label for both of these to send them back to Amazon tomorrow afternoon if I can't get it figured out. If I go that route I plan to buy an i7 4790k + MSI Z97 gaming 5. I'm just so sick of all the games I like making my CPUs have a stroke while my friends with i3s and i5s are blowing me out of the water. Thanks guys, this place has helped me a lot in the past but I truly am stumped on this one.

 

[Tyler Hammond]

I would send your parts back and purchase the I5-4690k and MSI Z97 Gaming 5 Motherboard. You will be plenty happy with the 4690k, I have it and there is no game that it can't handle.

Happy Holidays!

 

[konadh324]

I had also considered the 4690k, I see most benchmarks really don't show much in the way of fps differences on the same settings, and at 100 bucks less I really like it. But I'm really not into overclocking, and from what I can tell it seems like that's where most people get the real performance out of the i5. I'm willing to try overclocking, don't get me wrong. But tech has never really been my thing, I'm a car guy haha. I look at overclocking like I look at running boost through an engine. Too much and you've got a useless pile of scrap on your hands.

 

[Tyler Hammond]

I had also considered the 4690k, I see most benchmarks really don't show much in the way of fps differences on the same settings, and at 100 bucks less I really like it. But I'm really not into overclocking, and from what I can tell it seems like that's where most people get the real performance out of the i5. I'm willing to try overclocking, don't get me wrong. But tech has never really been my thing, I'm a car guy haha. I look at overclocking like I look at running boost through an engine. Too much and you've got a useless pile of scrap on your hands.

Alright, well in that case I would suggest the Xeon e3 1231-v3 processor. It's the same thing as a 4790k with a little lower base clock, but it doesn't have the ability to overclock. The best part about this processor, is that it performs just as well in gaming, has hyper-threading and is priced similarly to the 4690k.

 

[bystander]

Depending on how you play, you may not see major gains from the CPU. If you are the type who plays at the highest settings you can, even though the GPU is struggling to produce high FPS, you will not see a major improvement from the CPU change. If you lower settings or have super fast GPU's, then you will see a bigger improvement.

To see what is holding you back, you should monitor your GPU usage while you hit those areas you see low FPS, and see if the GPU usage is dropping below 90% usage. If it is, then an i5 would be an improvement, but if not, then you just need to lower some graphical settings.

 

[konadh324]

Hadn't even considered that, actually seems like a really good CPU. But if I was to go the i5 route what is the real impact on stock clock vs an overclock at say, 4.4ghz? I use this PC for gaming, and browsing. I don't do any recording, or streaming. If it's a big performance hit then I could justify the extra cost of a water cooler like a Corsair H60, but then I'm almost touching i7 prices again. 100 bucks really isn't going to break the bank, and after having 2 crap CPUs I just don't want to make a decision I regret for the 3rd time.

 

[konadh324]

Depending on how you play, you may not see major gains from the CPU. If you are the type who plays at the highest settings you can, even though the GPU is struggling to produce high FPS, you will not see a major improvement from the CPU change. If you lower settings or have super fast GPU's, then you will see a bigger improvement.

To see what is holding you back, you should monitor your GPU usage while you hit those areas you see low FPS, and see if the GPU usage is dropping below 90% usage. If it is, then an i5 would be an improvement, but if not, then you just need to lower some graphical settings.

As of now my peak GPU usage was 86%, but that was with CPUID running in the background so I don't know how accurate that really is. I don't necessarily have to have everything on ultra all the time, I like having the best graphics possible, but in reality the only thing I'm truly after is a steady and reliable 60 fps. The thing that doesn't make sense is that even with fallout 4 with everything on low I'm still dropping to the 30s and 20s.
A buddy of mine with an FX6300 is playing rock solid 60 on high. I'm thinking something may be defective with the new hardware, because 2 days ago out of nowhere the CPU cooler went to 100% and the CPU itself was running full bore 4.4ghz, and no matter what I did it wouldn't idle down again until I did a windows restore. Cool n Quiet was on, power settings were at balanced, and temps were in the low 40s. It just did it out of the blue. Not to mention my case's power button doesn't work on the motherboard, I have to use the button on the board itself to turn it on, every other board I've had it's worked fine. So don't know what's up with that.

 

[konadh324]

Just tested it again, went to the Corvega assembly plant, hit 18 fps. All but 3 cores were maxed at some point according to CPUID. And those 3 were all about 95%. GPU still holding steady at 86%

 

[bystander]

You are CPU bound, but the GPU should probably drop lower than 86% while the FPS drops to 18 and settings are at low.

 

[konadh324]

You are CPU bound, but the GPU should probably drop lower than 86% while the FPS drops to 18 and settings are at low.

This particular test was on medium / ultra / high. On low the GPU usage is about 35-40%

 

[bystander]

Ok, then total solution is going to be a faster CPU, or overclocking your existing one. On top of that, you'll likely have to drop settings down a bit. Your GPU sounds like it is nearing its limits on the Ultra test.

 

[konadh324]

Sending the FX8350 and asus board back to amazon today. Put my old athlon back in there and with a non clean install of windows it only dropped my fps 5 points. What a joke that FX was. I bit the bullet and bought an i7 4790k and MSI z97 gaming 5. I want this to be the last CPU and mobo I buy for a long time.

 

[ehtz28]

I have the 8350 paired with a 290x. First, you need to make sure afterburner or any third party software did not underclock your card. It happened to me when I unisntalled afterburner. Second, to get the best performance from the 8350 overclock it to 4.4 ghz or more. Third unpark the cores of the cpu so all will run at their full potential. Windows usualy park 2 cores to save energy. Once the procesor is unparked all your games will run as smooth as butter.

Check youtube there are tons of tutorials on how to do this. It is really simple.