- Sep 27, 2015
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So, I began building a new high performance PC piece by piece from Amazon and the first thing to arrive was the new graphics card, which was an EVGA GeForce GTX 970 Superclocked (4GB). I was already running a GeForce 650 Ti Boost in my current PC and knew my PSU could handle the new 970, so I swapped the cards until I had all the parts for my new PC and was ready for the build. The 970 worked perfectly without issues and I was even able to run GTA 5 on the highest possible quality without stutter or frame drops.
More than a week later the last piece arrives, the motherboard. I put the computer together that night, installed Windows, graphic drivers and motherboard drivers. Everything seemed to be running smoothly. I tend to play DotA 2 a lot so that was the first game I installed. I booted up the game without any error messages, but it seemed to stutter as it cycled through the menus. I got into my first game and had absolutely horrid stuttering. Moving the mouse to move the camera made it nearly unplayable. I turned Vsync on, which I never do since it locks your FPS and can cause input lag. Having Vsync on seemed to solve my issue until later in the game when we had a large team fight (large amounts of particle effects). The frames stayed steady but dropped significantly down to about 15/20 FPS, which made the game look like it was in slow mo.
I was hoping it was just the servers so I installed a single player game that I knew was somewhat demanding of the CPU/GPU and that also gave you recommended settings upon installation, Skyrim. After the installation of Skyrim it recommended Medium Settings, which was an immediate red flag for me. I changed it to Ultra and ran a current save I had saved on the Steam Cloud. The game seemed to run smoothly except with a few frame skips upon moving around. Another single player game I was recommended to try was Metro 2033. I had the game already on steam and a buddy told me that it was demanding on the PC if it was run on Ultra. Metro 2033 so far is the only game that doesn't seem to have any issues running on highest quality, however I only played about the first 10 minutes.
I installed two other online games, CSGO and LoL. Both had stuttering issues at highest quality with both Vsync on or off. In fact, when I had fps_max 300 set on CSGO, the frames would be as high as 120 and drop to 40-60 depending on what room/location I was in on the map.
My new build cost me ~$2000 USD and is as follows -
Motherboard: ASUS X99-PRO/USB 3.1 DDR4
CPU: Intel i7-5820K @ 3.3 GHz (6 Cores)
GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 970 Superclocked (4GB)
PSU: EVGA SuperNOVA 750W Gold
RAM: Corsair Dominator DDR4 (4x4GB - 16GB)
SATA: Samsung 500GB SSD (Where windows + Steam/Games are installed)
SATA2: WD Blue 1TB HDD (Currently empty but is already partitioned)
Monitor: BenQ GW2255 (Connected through DVI-D, was also connected to my former computer)
Things I've already tried:
-Made sure the resolutions matched my monitors resolution.
-In the Nvidia Control Panel, changed power settings to "High Performance". (Same for Windows power settings)
-Checked CPU temps during games, never exceeded ~50C on any games. GPU never went higher than 80C
-Turned off Windows Aero Theme
-Turning off both Vsync AND Anti-Aliasing together
I also bought a benchmark tool in hopes that it would show me what might be wrong because I thought, "What's another $25 to make sure my $2000 computer is working properly?" I ran a 3DMark test (Fire Strike).
1st Results: http://www.3dmark.com/fs/6068841
After consulting EVGA, I was told the only thing that stands out is the CPU Turbo Clock was only running at ~3.4 GHz when it should be running at ~3.9 GHz and was suggested to enable X.M.P. through BIOS, which I did.
2nd Results: http://www.3dmark.com/fs/6069420
It got up to 3.7 GHz but dropped the Stock Core Clock to 2.9
One other thing I saw in the BIOS was to enable optimized settings of the motherboard which would set higher clocks on all devices. These were the final results: http://www.3dmark.com/fs/6085619
If anyone is still reading my long biography of how I made a computer incorrectly, I'd appreciate any help! I'm not ruling out the possibility that either I got faulty hardware or I installed it incorrectly.
More than a week later the last piece arrives, the motherboard. I put the computer together that night, installed Windows, graphic drivers and motherboard drivers. Everything seemed to be running smoothly. I tend to play DotA 2 a lot so that was the first game I installed. I booted up the game without any error messages, but it seemed to stutter as it cycled through the menus. I got into my first game and had absolutely horrid stuttering. Moving the mouse to move the camera made it nearly unplayable. I turned Vsync on, which I never do since it locks your FPS and can cause input lag. Having Vsync on seemed to solve my issue until later in the game when we had a large team fight (large amounts of particle effects). The frames stayed steady but dropped significantly down to about 15/20 FPS, which made the game look like it was in slow mo.
I was hoping it was just the servers so I installed a single player game that I knew was somewhat demanding of the CPU/GPU and that also gave you recommended settings upon installation, Skyrim. After the installation of Skyrim it recommended Medium Settings, which was an immediate red flag for me. I changed it to Ultra and ran a current save I had saved on the Steam Cloud. The game seemed to run smoothly except with a few frame skips upon moving around. Another single player game I was recommended to try was Metro 2033. I had the game already on steam and a buddy told me that it was demanding on the PC if it was run on Ultra. Metro 2033 so far is the only game that doesn't seem to have any issues running on highest quality, however I only played about the first 10 minutes.
I installed two other online games, CSGO and LoL. Both had stuttering issues at highest quality with both Vsync on or off. In fact, when I had fps_max 300 set on CSGO, the frames would be as high as 120 and drop to 40-60 depending on what room/location I was in on the map.
My new build cost me ~$2000 USD and is as follows -
Motherboard: ASUS X99-PRO/USB 3.1 DDR4
CPU: Intel i7-5820K @ 3.3 GHz (6 Cores)
GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 970 Superclocked (4GB)
PSU: EVGA SuperNOVA 750W Gold
RAM: Corsair Dominator DDR4 (4x4GB - 16GB)
SATA: Samsung 500GB SSD (Where windows + Steam/Games are installed)
SATA2: WD Blue 1TB HDD (Currently empty but is already partitioned)
Monitor: BenQ GW2255 (Connected through DVI-D, was also connected to my former computer)
Things I've already tried:
-Made sure the resolutions matched my monitors resolution.
-In the Nvidia Control Panel, changed power settings to "High Performance". (Same for Windows power settings)
-Checked CPU temps during games, never exceeded ~50C on any games. GPU never went higher than 80C
-Turned off Windows Aero Theme
-Turning off both Vsync AND Anti-Aliasing together
I also bought a benchmark tool in hopes that it would show me what might be wrong because I thought, "What's another $25 to make sure my $2000 computer is working properly?" I ran a 3DMark test (Fire Strike).
1st Results: http://www.3dmark.com/fs/6068841
After consulting EVGA, I was told the only thing that stands out is the CPU Turbo Clock was only running at ~3.4 GHz when it should be running at ~3.9 GHz and was suggested to enable X.M.P. through BIOS, which I did.
2nd Results: http://www.3dmark.com/fs/6069420
It got up to 3.7 GHz but dropped the Stock Core Clock to 2.9
One other thing I saw in the BIOS was to enable optimized settings of the motherboard which would set higher clocks on all devices. These were the final results: http://www.3dmark.com/fs/6085619
If anyone is still reading my long biography of how I made a computer incorrectly, I'd appreciate any help! I'm not ruling out the possibility that either I got faulty hardware or I installed it incorrectly.
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