Desperate need for help, bizarre issue on my rig

Hi everyone,

Im having a very unusual problem with my rig that's driving me crazy and literally no one knows anything about it.

Here are the facts:

I had an FX6100 with a Radeon HD 6870 and 8gb at 1600mhz 1.5v and a PSU Sentey ERP-650SS.

So far so good, never had troubles in three years rather than low fps obviously so I decided to upgrade to an i5-4590 and a Gigabyte GA-H97M-Gaming 3 motherboard with the same RAM, GPU and PSU.

After I turned it on for the first time I had to format of course since it didnt recognize anything.

All good till then so a couple of days later I upgraded the 6870 to an MSI GTX 670 Power Edition OC (this one I purchased used). Removed ATI drivers, installed the gtx and its drivers and all games were running super fast in Ultra settings.

After two weeks one day I came from the office and wanted to play with the Huey for a while and whooooaaa: 15 fps with just me and no other unit loaded on the map. I said "what???"

I went to try other games to see if it was a DCS issue; I opened GTA V (which was running at 60 FPS with vsync) and 15 fps again!!! BF4 same thing, 25 fps!!

I left the pc very angry and didnt touch it till the next day. Same thing, all games extremely slow. I rebooted one time, same thing, two times same thing, three times and suddenly all games were running super fast again.

This thing happened everytime I rebooted: after the first power on all games slow, and after three reboots then all normal.

I decided to make a full format with DBAN (took 14 hours) since all evidence indicated that there was a software problem going on and perhaps having changed the GPU to a different brand left some driver issues. So I did and reinstalled everything again.

After this, I had three whole days with all games working perfect until yesterday where the SAME problem appeared again.

All hardware monitoring software report no issues on voltages, power, limits, frequencies, etc... Everything works perfect in numbers but games are still working slow.

For instance I wanted to play DCS today and the only way was to reboot the pc three times.

Please does anyone know something about this? I am so sorry to bring you such a weird issue.

Thanks everyone!

Have a look at what is running in the system when it is slow and when it is fast; maybe you have something in the background stealing cycles?

Nope :( first thing I looked and there is nothing running other than the game itself.

Try disabling the onboard GPU?

Sounds like overheating issues. Except, you said everything works for a couple of days. Check your CPU cooler, is it set properly on the CPU? Its either that, or you have a nasty trojan infection going on that keeps infecting your PC and turning it into a BOT. Did you visit any strange 'sites' on the web in the days your PC worked fine, open any 'strange' emails? Install anything from a USB drive? Install any 'suspicious' applications or games (especially downloaded from torrent sites)?

Weird issue= I bet on the RAM. Lower the frequency.

Maybe useless, but an easy test.

Try another Nvidia drivers.

do u still have the amd GPU u uninstalled when u put up the 960? u may try this : Re-install the 6870. Then use driver remover (or an equivalent utility) to totally remove the nvidia drivers.

Then install the latest amd drivers and run the games.

Do a thorough testing of the system, specifically, try to take note if the issues with fps changes keep happening. The 6870 should anyway run at more than 15, in DCS and in other games (if in some cases it doesn't, lower details and textures to have steady higher fps - it's just for testing purposes).

If the amd card runs stable fps in games, then it's some hardware problem with the 960 - I would suspect bad VRAM, but could be something else as well.

For example, is your PSU output in good health? 650 Watts should be enough to run the system you described with no problems, yet if the PSU current output is somehow corrupted, you may get weird effects like the ones described (which may be evident with the 960 if said card absorbs more power than the 6870 - although right now I 'm not able to verify the power requirements of the aforementioned cards)

The aim here is to isolate the hardware that causes you the instability:

After you scanned your rig with antivirus & anti malware and cleaned it from junk with ccleaner I would suggest the next hardware tests:

Test the MSI GTX 670 Power Edition OC with GPU stress software like

http://www.ozone3d.net/benchmarks/fur/

http://gaming.msi.com/features/afterburner

You mentioned that you purchased a 2hand (used) GPU? I'm not poking into anyone's pocket but I think that when it comes to hardware (unless you're a tech wizard) it's advisable to buy new parts.

Whitehot's advise is a good way of ruling out GPU's issues - If your games runs with a steady FPS on the 6870 than One thing would be obvious...

https://www.raymond.cc/blog/test-system-stability-by-putting-heavy-load-on-system-resources/

Good luck

sounds like a heat problem, be sure to check the temperatures while ingame (u can see the temperatures in your drivers overclocking settings) as the temperatures can drop very fast once the cpu/gpu is idle. As u remformated / have a fresh windows copy i wont think its a malware / virus , also a broken gpu or Ram would cause different effects ( Artifacts, Bluescreens...). If u havent done so, check the windows event viewer for errors. It also heard alot of Windows energy managment randomly shutting down devices, so try disabling it.

Seeing that several folks are citing overheating issues, there is another thing that comes to my mind.

Modern systems are made to downthrottle the CPU speed if the cores temperatures are too high. It is in fact, a safety measure to prevent the CPU to overheat, which modern mainboards implement when the fans have already been put at maximum speed.

In fact, modern CPUs tend to cycle their states, on the basis of how much processing power is needed to perform a certain work.

The cycle goes like this:

- The PC is booted, only the operating system is running so the CPU is basically idling. The system puts the CPU at its lowest output power state.

- The user starts up a game.

- The system realizes that, to run the game at the intended fps, it needs to raise the CPU speed. The CPU is hence brought to its maximum power state.

- The CPU is now working at the fullest - heat rises up quickly.

- The system detects the increase in heat, hence rises the fans speed gradually.

- IF, the fans reach their maximum speed, AND the temperatures are not dissipated (following a curve that is defined by the makers of the BIOS/MoBo), the systems has to "downclock" the CPU, in order to generate less heat, that the fans and the heatsink can now dissipate.

There would be two reasons by which this may be the OP situation:

- Being in the hot season (at least if we are talking northern hemisphere), the temperatures rises. Ambient temperature affects CPUs like everything else - basically the "baseline" temperature is higher than during winter or spring; moreover, dissipators are less efficient, as ambient temperature is higher they can't transfer the same amount of heat from the electronic components to the surrounding air.

- The OP changed its GFX card to a better one: in games like DCS often happens that, if a GPU is acting as a bottleneck, the CPU does not work at its full potential. Basically, for every calculation (in our sim, every frame to render), the CPU must wait for the GPU to have performed the "current" frame, before processing the next and passing it to the GPU again. This reduces the number of frames the CPU outputs in a given time, which result in fact, in a smaller workload on the cores. Which means, of course, less heat.

Having installed a more powerful GPU could have then put more workload on the CPU (which is a good thing - everything is more efficient) and causing its downclocking by the system.

Anyway, to determine if the nature of the problem is like this one, one has to monitor the temperatures of the CPU cores, the frequency at which they are working and possibly the speeds of the fans inside the rig. An utility like AIDA64 (there are many others, some for free) can monitor all these parameters and display them real-time.

Thanks everyone for your kind responses. I will respond to the replies in a very basic way so we dont mix things up tomorrow :)

Temperatures are super fine, meaning that no component goes above 50°C.

RAM is clocked at 1600 in stock config so I dont think it's the problem.

Onboard GPU has been disabled as soon as I got the new GTX.

I dont have the 6870 unfortunately.

I didnt install almost anything other than DCS after the clean format. I did use the same external USB 1TB drive to back up things.

The most wierd thing of all is that this bizarre issue gets solved by rebooting which drives me crazy :(

I mean, if it's a hardware issue (which I wouldn't want to believe to be honest) why would all work so perfect and fast sometimes and extremely poor and slow other times.

Question: Is it possible that the PSU is causing this due to being bad quality plus old? I mean, again how can it not work well sometimes?

To Mowgli: Yes, the card is used and it concerns me now, can a bad card behave like this (considering all I mentioned)?

THANKS guys.

The issue gets solved by rebooting? What do you mean? The PC works normally for a bit after rebooting, then starts slowing down again?

It seriously sounds like a bad virus infection.

http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/504/how-to-uninstall-hidden-devices-drivers-and-services/

might be worth a shot? don't go overboard though, it could cause a Windows activation to kick in

Another... did you scrub the drive you were using or install new ones?

Your pc don't run good when he is cold (first boot), over the time (after three reboot) your pc get warm then run good. Right?

- You have cold soldering in your psu unit.

- Your RAM are sick when cold.

- The video card hates the cold.

If you keep your pc always on, how he goes? Good?

That's indeed an unconventional problem. I need more info on when the problem occurs.

You said a restart solves the problem. So I guess it comes back after a while? If so, is it a certain amount of time after reboot or is it after you did something specific maybe?

Hi guys, sorry I couldnt reply before, too much going on at the office.

The issue remains as long as I dont reboot the system a couple of times and viceversa. So if games are running perfect and I dont reboot my pc for lets say two weeks, then all games run fine during those weeks until I reboot or shut it down, then the next time I turn it on every game runs slow (no windows issue, just in games). I had it powered on for two weeks and a half and all games were perfect, I remember I was playing GTA V at the time.

If games run slow then they wont run any better until I reboot the pc a couple of times.

Jeez! This is so strange I cant believe it's happening lol.

Thanks guys.

Ram degradation? It's why I told you to lower the frequency as low as possible.

I had this kind of problem, but the pc (warm) needed several attempts only to boot.

Maybe video card problem.

the ram is relatively new, and the problem appeared just after I changed hard... so tomorrow a friend will lend me a psu and will see if it changes :(

im so frustrated

When the problem occur, you can use AIDA64 or OCCT to test the components.

When the problem occur, you can use AIDA64 or OCCT to test the components.

Hi Demon, what kind of tests do they perform?

Nothing, i have no problem except cold soldering in my psu. Too lazy to open the box.

I use Prime95 for overclocking the cpu and test the ram.

I tried MSI Kombustor, but it's not a big torture test. I use DCS to test the video card (still lazy).

I think AIDA64 look good. Never tried it.

CPU torture test

RAM torture test

Video card torture test

PSU test

HWMonitor: http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html

i did all those tests and there was no report of any issue going on :(

It's why I don't use them :lol: Except Prime95 for the overclocking.

You can use a hair dryer to heat up the components, but that is not easy.

I use this for real time monitoring:

You can monitor a lot of things like the gpu memory clock, core clock...

Maybe you will be able to see a drop somewhere.