Upgraded comp, terrible performance. Need your input!

Discussion in 'Player Support' started by Typhoeus, Jan 5, 2014.

  1. Typhoeus

    Ok here's my story. I decided to upgrade my gf's pc over the holidays. I swapped out her motherboard and cpu to put in a brand new ASUS z87-a paired with an i7 4770k. The rest of the hardware was left as is. 1000w power supply, two sticks of 8gb hyperx ddr3, regular 2tb hard drive thats been though many formats (I've lost count) and finally a msi gtx 660ti PE that was installed last June.

    I run nearly the exact same setup on my pc except replace that ASUS z87-a with a GIGABYTE G1. Sniper M5 and 2x sli msi gtx 660ti PE's and a hard drive that's never been formatted yet.

    On my pc I get 90+ steady fps while in sli everything maxed out except motion blur turned off. When using just one card I get 70+ steady fps.

    Now here's the infuriating and perplexing part. On her pc she doesn't even break 30fps under the same settings. When frame rate indicator is turned on it's got the yellow [GPU] beside it, indicating it's being bottle necked by the graphics card. Right? Why such a drastic change in performance on nearly identical builds. I'm going with a wild guess here thinking either the graphics card is broke or the old hard drive or power supply may be faulty somehow resulting in terrible performance? Is that even a thing/possibility? Any input from any tech geniuses would be appreciated cuz I'm honestly at a loss here :(
  2. BlackDove

    Turn off smoothing, does it do it with all games, and what psu does it have?
    • Up x 1
  3. amega

    Try to test your Hdd with HD Sentinel. That is the first thing you should do ever . If you have weak sectors on surface of the disk or lots of mistakest you can say goodbye to him. Than be sure you have the latest bios upgrade (someone will tell me iam wrong , but iam strongly believe -ASUS are the worst choise of motherboard) And after all - You changed matherboard, do you reinstalled the system ?
    • Up x 1
  4. Amarsir

    I'm using the z-87. It's a good board.

    Forgive the dumb question, but you reinstalled from scratch, right? People who try to keep using the old OS after such an upgrade inevitably run into problems.

    Although I didn't do it and you shouldn't have to, you can try going into the bios and disabling the onboard video. Just on the chance it's interfering with the card.
    • Up x 1
  5. BlackDove

    amega: What? Asus is actually one of the best. HDD sectors likely have nothing to do with his FPS. He'd be getting crashes and errors with his operating system, not poor performance. BIOS flashing is also a very unlikely thing to cause the kind of issues he's describing.

    The most likely issue is a driver one, hardware failure, heat issue causing throttling, or something like a mining virus that degrades the performance of his CPU or GPU.

    I/O issues could cause stuttering, but that would be like "my HDD is constantly defragmenting while I play a game, never finishes, then computer goes to sleep 10 minutes after I exit the game, so the PC is always defragging when it's on". Actually encountered that error, and someone was defragging for months, without realizing why their computer was working at 1/10 its capability and disconnecting constantly.

    He also could have some process running in the background that he doesn't know about, like a virus. Viruses that use the GPU to do mining are becoming very common now.

    To rule out software/viruses, get the following tools, run them, and report the results. I recommend these to everyone I know, because they make my job much easier when I'm helping people with their tech support issues.

    http://www.malwarebytes.org/trial/ do a quick scan once it updates.

    http://www.malwarebytes.org/antirootkit/ follow the instructions, update, and run a scan.

    If you don't have an antivirus, at least use something like this.

    http://www.avira.com/en/avira-free-antivirus make sure to turn everything on maximum detection for the type of scan selected.

    http://www.f-secure.com/en/web/home_us/online-scanner or this for something just to scan.

    http://www.av-test.org/en/home/ ratings for different antivirus software.

    I'm guessing that this guy will find some malware on his PC, or it's a driver/hardware issue.

    If you're really worried about your HDD, you can always get something like SeaTools(only for Seagate HDD's) or whatever your manufacturer's software is to check if the hard drive passes SMART etc.

    Also update and clean install the drivers, check all the connections, check everything physically, and use the graphics card manufacturer's software to monitor temperatures, and voltages.
    • Up x 2
  6. BlackDove

    P.S. You shouldn't be GPU limited at all in PS2 on your main computer. I have an underclocked 660Ti and I run the game on ultra/high with texture filtering on high quality etc.

    Reconfigure your NVidia driver settings to be these:

    texture filtering quality: high quality

    negative LOD bias: clamp

    transparency antialiasing: multisample

    triple buffering

    adaptive Vsync

    The game will actually look decent if you use those settings in the drivers.

    Also, make sure smoothing is OFF in PS2!

    Turn fog shadows off, and you can easily use motion blur with all the other settings maxed out, including a 6000m render distance. I have a less powerful GPU and I do.
  7. lunate

    Try running on ultra, if you are running on low the game might cause stress to the CPU.
  8. Ranari

    Are you sure you plugged your monitor into the 660Ti slot? Based on your performance claims, it almost sounds like you plugged the monitor into the motherboard, which is the iGPU.
    • Up x 2
  9. BlackDove

    LOL that would be hilarious if true.
  10. SerArysOakHeart

    I once sent 2 GPU's back to the store because I thought they were faulty .. turns out I only plugged 1 of the 2 PCI power leads in, I facepalmed..
    • Up x 1
  11. JonboyX

    You did do a fresh install of Windows didn't you?

    Your GPU isn't "broken". If it were, you'd know about it as soon as you pressed the power on button.

    If you've definitely plugged your monitor in to the right slot (as mentioned above) then it is almost definitely a driver issue.
    • Up x 1
  12. Typhoeus

    Hey guys. I'm back from a nights sleep and a day of work. Sorry I forgot to mention some of these details but yes it was a fresh install. So no compatibility issues, viruses or malware should be present. Only game on her machine right now is PS2 so can't test with other games, and even if I could, we all know PS2 is a different animal then anything else out there right now. There are also no heat issues what so ever. The monitor is also plugged into the 660ti and both pci power leads are locked into the card :p

    To those talking about ingame and nvidia control center graphics settings, I've already tried everything. The highest framerate I managed to get was about 70fps with very low settings and a low resolution (1230x1024 or something). I'm well aware this card should be pushing 70fps with nearly everything maxed out. That's why I'm here ;)

    Amega, my gf followed your tips and scanned the thing with HD Sentinel and everything checks out okay. She's also reinstalled the cards drivers and no luck.

    I'm truly starting to think the graphics card itself is defecting somehow. Are there any programs to test a graphics card? Also I'm wondering if it'd be possible a bad PCIe x16 slot could be doing this as well? As in, the one the card is plugged into (the top one as the manual and youtube vids tell you to use). If so how do you check if it's faulty?
    • Up x 1
  13. Typhoeus

    I'm nowhere near her pc atm so would it be possible for you to give me a step by step on how to get to that option? Press F2 or Del at boot and then what? ^^
  14. BlackDove

    As long as you have the cable plugged into the GPU, and only have one cable connected, without that VirtuMVP stuff, the integrated shouldn't cause the problem.
  15. amega

    Well,, I just work in pc repair shop for several years, and we have tons of asus motherboards which....a ....sorry i forget the word- they does not work well or does not work at all after several month. By the way i remeber was a case ,,, one of native asus blutooth drivers for mother led to a poor perfomance in test and games. P.S Just to try.... video test (uningine heaven benchmark -http://unigine.com/products/heaven. for example for mother in test
  16. JonboyX


    I had a quick look at the picture of the board. Graphics card "suitable" slots come with retaining clips at the side. I would be almost certain that your motherboard will automatically assign 16 lanes to that yellow PCIe slot at the top (technically slot 2) - and reading the manual it does say to put it in that one. You could try it also in slot 5 (the black one with the clip) but again, in my experience you don't get reduced performance if something is faulty, you just get no performance at all ;) Don't put it in slot 7 - the one furthest from the CPU as that's only a 2x.


    Hmmm.

    Thinking of other solutions; which graphics mode have you got your BIOS set to? In the Graphics Configuration, it should be set to AUTO by default; you could force an override to PCIe to ensure you're not on the onboard chip (which you might be I guess at 30fps?). You should be able to tell in Windows though simply by going to your Display settings; it'll tell you which device is powering your monitor. It might be that the iGPU is taking over in the desktop though.

    Struggling for further ideas really!
  17. amega

    Oh.. and i dont rememer in bios for this mom an option to disable int video card, But it doest mean its not exisit http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/LGA1150/Z87-A/E7828_Z87-A.pdf page 2-6 in help. What can i say also about moms, did you checked contacts in soket before instaling cpu ? sometimes thy are bent. Memory work in dual chanel mode? If you system installed under AHCI or IDE? it si in sata configuration. you may try to clear CMOS and then check it back ACHI-IDE - PAGE 2-29 in help. For WIN7 AHCI IS PREFERED. It could probably be the video card in case you pluged in power from One cable. Better to use separrate cables from power supply. Mostly if the card is broken there is artifacts and no pure fps.
  18. Irathi

    Does it say you are CPU or GPU limited in game when it runs at 30 fps?

    If it says CPU, check the temperatures in case you added too much or too little thermal paste.
    Are your shadows set to ultra/high?

    Do you have Vsync on and a refresh set to 30hz?
  19. NC_agent00kevin

    Make sure it doesnt have any parked cores. A fresh install may well have them parked. Also make sure your power plan allows for 100% max frequency. I have mine set to 100% minimum too, which means that anything the CPU does, it does balls out. It consumes more power but I do lots of other things around the house to save energy, so whats a few watts for gaming? Make sure your clock speeds are correctly set in BIOS (sometimes they arent for no good reason) as well.