Gaming → [Tech] Performance Increase?

Hey Guys,

I'm trying to figure out what upgrade(s) could be done to my system to increase it's gaming performance. I recently upgraded from a 7 year old 1680x1050 screen to a 1920x1080 screen and have noticed that pushing the extra pixels have had caused me to push down my settings some.

The issues I'm noticing are:
1. Minecraft will dip down to as low as 20 FPS at times and my CPU fan is running at what sounds like 100% the entire time I am playing.
2. Far Cry 3/4 both rarely make it over 30 FPS and it varies A LOT, it might dip down to 5-10 FPS during an explosion, but then be 25 FPS just seconds later.
3. I have a lot of "stutters" in games... if there is a big explosion for example, the game will often freeze, or dip down to 5 FPS or less until the explosion is over. The stutters is what is bothering me the most... going from playing around 30 FPS and just dips down to less than 5 FPS really does it for me... or when the FPS is all over the place... such as 50 FPS then turn the corner around a building and dips down to 20 FPS.

These are my specs:
AMD FX-8350 at stock settings with stock cooler
Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 Motherboard
12 GB DDR3 PC8500 Memory (Low End/No Heatsinks)
2x Gigabyte R9 270 (Not X) 2 GB in CrossFire
No SSD's. Regular HDD's.
Windows 8.1 (although I did downgrade to Windows 7 for a period of time with no change in performance)

I have tried have different driver versions, such as downgrading all the way back to version 13... I am now using a beta version released on the 17th.

I really want to be able to enjoy Far Cry 4 and upcoming GTA V without all these studder issues and only 20-30 FPS.

My plan as of right now is to sell the R9's I have and get a GTX 970 instead... but perhaps there is something else that needs to be done as well?

Wow. I'm wondering if you have some other issues going on else where.

The PC I built for my little boys recently with a Intel Haswell G3258, GTX 650 and runs Minecraft beautifully at 1080p. That's the main game they play.

Batman Arkham City and Origins also runs at 50-60fps on medium settings.

If anything, I'd definitely look to ditch the low end crossfire setup. CF'ing 2 low end cards like that is damn near worthless when you can get better, more stable performance off a single card.

I'll start by saying I'm with Ghastly on this, and there's probably more going on than just the GPUs, your CPU should be up to par, so I'd look at the shape of the HDD the games are installed on, and if they're healthy I'd try a clean driver install.

I would suggest removing the driver, running DDU (or something similar) and re-installing the most recent stable driver.

EQ

It sounds like something isn't working right, as the others said.

Are the graphics cards overclocked? If so return them to stock.

The first thing I would do is remove one of the 270 cards and see if performance improves. If it doesn't I would run the other 270 alone and see if things improve.

If performance was adequate in 1680 and dropped noticeably in 1920 resolution then that would generally indicate a graphics issue, rather than some cpu limit but something seems wrong. I wouldn't spend money buying an expensive graphics card until you can have more confidence that everything else is working correctly.

I would do what the others have said, with something to keep in mind:

FC3 is horribly optimized and doesn't play well with Crossfire at all. I have two 290X's and would have the FPS dip into the 20s @ 2560x1440. I'd do what asdfdf recommended and try each GPU by itself and see if the situation improves.

Secondly, your 8350 may be overheating and throttling -- there is no way of knowing if you don't monitor it. I'd recommend grabbing Realtemp or a similar program and track your CPU usage/temps. If they are really high, you might need an aftermarket cooler. I haven't build a rig with an AMD FX CPU, so I have little idea how effective the included coolers are.

Lastly, amd this is more for the group, I believe your CPU supports up to 1600mhz memory natively. I know that using faster or slower memory usually has a marginal effect, but I'd recommend you memtest all your dimms to ensure they are still good. I don't know if you would see much of an improvement of moving up to faster (1600mhz) dimms.

I do think the single card, beefier solution is a valid strategy once you have done your due diligence on the rest of the rig.

I missed that, good idea.

I agree, and the last part of you post is the most important part. I'd absolutely rule out other components before trying anything else (eg: a single beefier card)

quote:

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AMD FX-8350 at stock settings with stock cooler

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My personal experience with stock coolers has never been positive, both on the AMD and Intel side. I would check CPU temps before I started swapping hardware in and out, simply because it is easier to do.

To add to this, my experience with stock coolers has been that they're either average or bad. I had what was considered a relatively good stock HSF experience, and my CPU (3770 non-K) was averaging about 40c when I switched to the CM212 I dropped to 29c

There's only so far you can go with a stock HSF, and I'd check your temps there as well.

Thanks for all the suggestions and input. I decided to run Prime95 and Overdrive/HW Monitor to see what my temps would be under load. Attached is a screenshot. If indeed a HSF is recommend, any suggestions on a decent model would be greatly appreciated.

I can't find a citation, but googling around reveals that max safe temp on the FX-8350 is 60 C and below. I would definitely look into a better cooler. If you like, you can try re-seating and re-applying the TIM, but I would NOT run it above 60 C for any meaningful length of time.

I would test with real games that you are having issues with, not prime95. You are probably not hitting those temps in games.

Wow, really? I had no idea the FX chips were like that. Shows what I know about AMD. My knee jerk from years and years with Intel is "You didn't break 85 C under full load? Eh, you're fine then."

I think they max on Sandy Bridge (among others) is like...103 C or something ridiculous like that. I've never had a component break 100 C in my PCs before (though my old GTX 285 eventually started hitting 90-95 C before it finally died several years back).

I'm fairly sure. I read half a dozen threads referencing this, and most of them pointed back to AMD's site, but I could not find a link to the AMD spec sheet for the FX processors that listed a max safe temperature.

It's true Intel can go up to something like 99 - 105 C before throttling, but AMD is different. Sort of like the current R9 graphics cards are designed to run and idle at 90 C--I had mine floating at 94 C solid when mining for months.

A good aftermarket CPU cooler can make an amazing difference. I never bought into it all for the longest time and then I finally did it and I will never use stock HSF ever again. The noise and heat reduction is night and day difference. Also, buy a good one and it's something you can take with you into a new build down the road.

I know a lot of the guys here will suggest a water cooler or the Hyper 212 or whatever that one is, but I'm a big Noctua fan personally. They are whisper quite and usually rank extremely well on heat reduction. They rival water cooling solutions actually.

Theres gotta be something else. My brothers 8320 and 7870ghz edition(7870 is pretty much the same as 1 270) can do minecraft no problem. From what I've heard far cry doesn't play that nice with multiple gpus, at least amd ones. Gotta be something else, my bro with a 8320 and my friends with amd quad core athlons and fx quad cores have no problem in most games even at 1080p. It *could* be the cpu fan, if it always sounds at 100% it may not be cooling like it should for a multitude of reasons, which could cause the cpu to throttle. Make sure you have two crossfire bridges on the 270's if they have the slots for them. When xfire in two amd gpus if you use two bridges for some reason the performance is better than if just one.

I guess perhaps I didn't explain myself clearly as I thought I did. Minecraft plays fine, my average FPS is 60-70. However, the entire time I am playing my CPU fan is running at 100% and I do often get drops into the 20 FPS area, but only for a quick moment... perhaps it's normal and is loading a chunk. It's not unplayable by any means and like I said, my average is 60-72 FPS. However, it's the "stutter" issue (which I also have in other games) which bother me.

It could be chunk loading, it can cause a stutter on slower drives. Still for the other games it sounds like something more. Try 1 gpu, and monitor the cpu usage and temps, and if you can maybe a different hard drive.

Try slightly underclocking the GPUs, and then up the voltage ever so slightly. Try a different HDD.

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm going to run an HDTune Benchmark on the primary drive tonight when I get home and see what the results are. The system, as a whole, has seemed pretty slow lately, but then again, my laptop that I use for 9+ hours a day has a SSD so I may also just be getting used to that.

The stock AMD fan is loud as hell and does nothing to cool the VRMs, which is probably why you're throttling. Spend $26 on a 212 EVO and use the stock fan as a VRM or socket cooler.

I have two rigs with the same motherboard as you and neither of them have ever throttled like you describe, especially at stock settings.