What is causing this?

[o0LuNeStA0o]

Ok hopefully you guys can help me since this forum covers a more broad area than the others. I've asked this on multiple forums and have still had no success.


Since I've built my pc I've had poor performance, while I could play the games I wanted I had to lower my settings quite a bit. I initially started out with:

I3 3220
corsair vengeance 8gb ram
HiS HD 7770
Coolermaster 450w
ASRock B75m-DGS R2.0
Seagate Barracuda 1TB


I have since then upgraded to:
i5-3470
Sapphire HD 7870
Seasonic 620w


After doing that I have seen maybe a little bit of an increase in performance, however I still have to use pretty much the same settings.

Other things I have tried:

Switching from W8 to W7. Didn't really expect much and I was correct.
Nothing is overheating.
Updating drivers.

I'm convinced it's something to do with the mobo. Some of the games I play people using the same cpu and gpu play on high at least whereas I play on low or medium at best. I flashed my bios and it did nothing. I've even tried using gamebooster, to no avail.

So as you can probably guess this problem is really really annoying.

Games:
Red orchestra 2 - Mostly low or medium settings just to maintain 60fps. Still drops occasionally.

Skyrim - I remember a time, right after I got my new cpu and gpu when I could play skyrim with 60fps and about 80 mods. But now I get lag of about 20fps even on vanilla if there are more than 8 people fighting.

BF4 - fps drops to about 30 even on the lowest settings possible.

The only game that runs well is BF3, I can get 60fps on high with ease.

Any help is much appreciated.

 

[yoji]

Skyrim - I remember a time, right after I got my new cpu and gpu when I could play skyrim with 60fps and about 80 mods. But now I get lag of about 20fps even on vanilla if there are more than 8 people fighting.

this is a very telling comment.. to me it suggests something has broken.. or something else is using up your PC resources.

The fact you say BF3 runs well.. make me think its the latter.
Do you have a clean Skyrim install? you comment "and about 80 mods" make me think you are may be someone who loads up your PC with loads of mods and other crap.. and then wonder why stuff slows down!!!

So at a guess.. you have some bad mods/addons which have caused this... even if you think you removed.. if they badly written..may be there are remnants getting in the way.

So I not going to help.. and suggest the classic service desk "solution" ... reinstall windows.... and once done.. then my tip

Cheers

 

[o0LuNeStA0o]

It's possible, though that's what the point of running gamebooster is. It frees up resources while I play, its something I could do myself but is much easier to use that. I had thought it could of been the mods causing the Skyrim problems, but when I deactivated all of them and even reinstalled Skyrim the problem still persisted. Plus, I only downloaded the exact same mods I had that ran well.

I have reinstalled windows, but I suppose it wouldn't hurt to do it again.

"So I not going to help". Well I thank you for your cooperation....

Any other suggestions?

 

[yoji]

Well it not that I don't want help.. (or I would not have bothered in the first place)..its just that its incredibly difficult to help with such issues remotely..

especially when the reason you got into this mess looks to be because you don't really know what you are doing.. so trying to explain detailed solutions is difficult. .and I have no confidence you could execute correctly.

I am confident if I was in front of your comp - I could fix in no time.. but im not.. and your snarky comment just makes me more confident I was right to just say.. reinstall..

If someone else wants to take it on. good luck
Cheers

 

[o0LuNeStA0o]

While that is understandable, your presentation leaves much to be desired.

Well then explain to me how I don't know what I'm doing. Attempt to be helpful rather than act like an arrogant douche.

I'm glad you made a suggestion, however stating "So I'm not going to help" was unnecessary. "You really don't know what you're doing so trying to explain detailed solutions is difficult" so you also like insulting people's intelligence? Very mature. With comments like those are you really surprised you got a "snarky" response?

 

[4745454b]

Whoa, easy now. Lets behave and be nice.

What temps are you seeing? CPU and GPU please. % usage while playing games? RAM amount? I agree that you shouldn't judge performance with a game that has tons of mods added to it, so please test with new drivers and no mods on anything. Resolution is 1080 right?

 

[06yfz450ridr]

Ahh. Everyone just calm down and move on.

Either way all your components are basically new and good quality.

To me i had similar problens that ended up being the bios.

Either way could you run like furmark or msi afterburner and confirm your gpu is going to 99%.

At one point my 7970 would boost to 99%. Then slowly drop to 75 due to either drivers or unstable overclock.


One other thing is to run a malware and virus scan. These are usually overlooked but can have the same affect.

 

[o0LuNeStA0o]

Being nice is fun

Generally my CPU doesn't reach higher than 70c, it's been quite cooler since I put a few case fans in. Would probably benefit from a cpu cooler other than the stock one, but I think it should work for now. GPU is usually around the same temp as the CPU. I run afterburner all the time and I don't think I have ever seen the gpu usage hit 99%. Sometimes it bounces around to like 22% and then up to 60% and so on. I have noticed that the core clock speed of the gpu is sometimes at 300mhz rather than 1050.

Yes 1080p. In most of the games I've had trouble with my fps stays the same regardless of resolution as well. Not really sure what that means though.

I've considered it could be something in the bios setup, however I am completely lost when I go in there. I'm not sure what a lot of it is, so I just don't touch any of it. Is it possible that the overclock done by the manufacturer was unstable?

 

[4745454b]

70C CPU is probably bad. Not sure it's thermally throttling at that point. I think Intel CPUs are supposed to be around 62C. Simple test would be to open your case and point a house fan at the CPU. Is everything better?

Edit: Tcase is 67.4C, so 70 is to hot. As a general principle I always try to keep my CPUs under 60C.

http://ark.intel.com/products/68316/Intel-Core-i5-3470-Processor-6M-Cache-up-to-3_60-GHz

 

[06yfz450ridr]

In msi afterburner raise the power limit and see if it goes to 99%. Your gpu should be at that while gaming. Since its downclocking i would suspect its something with the overclock or if your cpu is throttling it would have similar results. Start from stock gpu clocks and confirm in goes to 99% in kombustor etc

 

[o0LuNeStA0o]

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/347327-28-temp-reading-high-3470

I feel that if it were overheating it would be a much more simple fix compared to the other possibilities. But I've had multiple people on tomshardware tell me that intel cpu's are fine up to 90c. I still plan on getting an aftermarket cooler soon enough. I certainly don't think the temps it hits are "good" but shouldn't be throttling at that point. Plus if it were throttling wouldn't the fps drops occur after some time playing? This is just immediately.

I tried putting it back to stock and increasing the power limit and still no improvement. I'll have to check it out on bf4 or something but on mount and blade warband (game of thrones mod) i was only getting 30% usage in battle and still getting stutter/drops. I only increased the power to +2, not really sure if I should go higher or not.

 

[o0LuNeStA0o]

Unless you think it could be the hdd or ram? I'll run a memtest tonight to make sure it's not the ram. The hdd has been a little shady since I got it, but I don't think hdd have much effect on fps right?

 

[06yfz450ridr]

Unless you think it could be the hdd or ram? I'll run a memtest tonight to make sure it's not the ram. The hdd has been a little shady since I got it, but I don't think hdd have much effect on fps right?

the hdd shouldn't affect fps just loading times.

your best bet is to update the bios. also from the factory it will not be overclocked and you cannot overclock the i3 unless you just raise bclk. could be some sort of setting not being picked up correctly in the bios

also set your ram timings manually and make sure it is actually running at 1866 since default it will run 1333 . I know on my old bios revision it did nto pick up my timings correctly for my vengeance should be 9-10-9-24 or 27 I forget

 

[o0LuNeStA0o]

I looked and it did have have the timing for the RAM wrong. But since changing that I still haven't noticed any difference.

I'm really considering changing motherboards, since changing the cpu, gpu, and psu had no effect. Or would you recommend a different action?

 

[4745454b]

Simple test would be to open your case and point a house fan at the CPU. Is everything better?

I didn't see where you tried this. Got nothing to lose. Just because you think the temps are good doesn't mean they are. This is a good way to check fast. (Meaning don't just come back and tell me it didn't work, actually do it and see.)

 

[o0LuNeStA0o]

Will do. I shall report back soon.

 

[o0LuNeStA0o]

Well I tried that and while the temps were slightly lower I didn't really see any difference in performance for better or worse.