Parallax Abstraction
New Member
Hey everyone. Long time reader, but first time poster here. I've had no luck finding answers to this elsewhere and given the skill among this community, I'm hoping maybe someone can assist. This post is going to be quite long, but I have spent I don't know how many hours trying to figure this out and I think context is important for it to make sense. I've also been building my own PCs since the DOS era and have never seen something this strange.
To start, here's my current hardware:
In several games, particularly Spare Marine II and Helldivers II but also others like Cyberpunk 2077, I'm getting poor performance, well below what I should be getting with specs like these. Using those two games as examples, I'm talking near constantly running below 60fps at 1440p, no matter how low or high the settings are. Literally seems to make no difference, even if in Space Marine II, I drop everything to low. Even on my old 3080, things weren't right and since upgrading to a 9070 XT, they literally don't run any better. A number of games I play do run quite well, but when I compare my frame rates to benchmarks I see online, it's clear they're running worse than they should be and that the GPU doesn't seem to be the issue. In addition, I have sudden dips in performance that's noticeable in games like Hunt: Showdown and Lords of the Fallen. FPS will just go off a cliff for a few seconds, then recover.
What I also noticed was odd is that even though the games listed above are known to be very CPU intensive, my 5800X rarely shows as running at 100% utilization when these games are struggling and I have friends who play them on worse CPUs without issue. It's also not throttling and is holding boost for long periods. Stranger still, if I say, run a CPU stress test or try to render a video in Davinci Resolve, it shows that the CPU can indeed run at 100% load for sustained periods.
What I've tried:
My ASUS motherboard listed above also just suddenly died on me this past weekend, ultimately refusing to power on and flashing a corrupted BIOS code that a flashback couldn't resolve. I found the new Gigabyte board in stock locally and installed it. Performance wise, literally nothing has changed. In addition, when the CPU is under full load in the FurMark CPU Burner, the Power Deviation value shows as around 74%, which as I understand it from the pinned thread, is not good at all. Unfortunately, I didn't check this on my old board. Is it possible there could be another CPU defect that's causing this somehow?
I'm really at my wits end here as I've tried just about everything and can't nail down why this CPU just doesn't seem to be performing the way it should. Needless to say, that it's crimping the performance of my brand new 9070 XT is extra frustrating. I'm planning to build a new machine eventually, but it's not in the budget for a while and I'd like to figure out what's wrong with this one first as I hope to sell it when I build a new one. I'm not sure if I still have AMD warranty coverage on this CPU and obviously, since things are stable, it'd likely be pulling teeth trying to file a claim with them without strong evidence.
Does anyone out there potentially have any ideas or has maybe seen this before? At this point, I'm willing to try just about anything, no matter how whacky. Is it possible the CPU could be defective, but only in this non-stability related way? I can't imagine so, but I've seen weirder things happen.
I appreciate any thoughts anyone has on the matter. Cheers everyone!
To start, here's my current hardware:
- Ryzen 5800X (system started with a 3700X)
- Gigabyte B550 Aorus Elite AX v2 (formerly ASUS ROG Strix X570-F Gaming, more on this later) with latest BIOS
- Corsair H150i Pro 360mm AIO
- 32GB (2x 16GB) Corsair PC-3200 DDR4, running in XMP
- 2x WD SN850x NVME SSDs
- Sapphire Radeon 9070 XT Nitro+ (was previously a Gigabyte 3080, important in story)
- Windows 11 Pro 24H2
- 3 1440p displays, one OLED (360Hz), two LED (144Hz)
- Seasonic 1000W PSU (was a Corsair 750W before new GPU)
- No overclock or undervolt applied to anything, though it has been tried
In several games, particularly Spare Marine II and Helldivers II but also others like Cyberpunk 2077, I'm getting poor performance, well below what I should be getting with specs like these. Using those two games as examples, I'm talking near constantly running below 60fps at 1440p, no matter how low or high the settings are. Literally seems to make no difference, even if in Space Marine II, I drop everything to low. Even on my old 3080, things weren't right and since upgrading to a 9070 XT, they literally don't run any better. A number of games I play do run quite well, but when I compare my frame rates to benchmarks I see online, it's clear they're running worse than they should be and that the GPU doesn't seem to be the issue. In addition, I have sudden dips in performance that's noticeable in games like Hunt: Showdown and Lords of the Fallen. FPS will just go off a cliff for a few seconds, then recover.
What I also noticed was odd is that even though the games listed above are known to be very CPU intensive, my 5800X rarely shows as running at 100% utilization when these games are struggling and I have friends who play them on worse CPUs without issue. It's also not throttling and is holding boost for long periods. Stranger still, if I say, run a CPU stress test or try to render a video in Davinci Resolve, it shows that the CPU can indeed run at 100% load for sustained periods.
What I've tried:
- Full uninstall and reinstall of the AMD chipset drivers (using HiBit Uninstaller) and multiple DDU and reinstalls of both NVIDIA drivers for my old card and AMD drivers for my new one
- Closing as many background processes as possible when playing
- Doing the same, while also disabling as many startup applications as possible
- Fully resetting BIOS settings
- Disabling PBO
- Undervolting CPU via PBO
- Fully repasting CPU with Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut
- Ensuring temperatures are running well within spec
- Disabling (disconnecting) non-primary displays
- Finally, a full OS reload from scratch
My ASUS motherboard listed above also just suddenly died on me this past weekend, ultimately refusing to power on and flashing a corrupted BIOS code that a flashback couldn't resolve. I found the new Gigabyte board in stock locally and installed it. Performance wise, literally nothing has changed. In addition, when the CPU is under full load in the FurMark CPU Burner, the Power Deviation value shows as around 74%, which as I understand it from the pinned thread, is not good at all. Unfortunately, I didn't check this on my old board. Is it possible there could be another CPU defect that's causing this somehow?
I'm really at my wits end here as I've tried just about everything and can't nail down why this CPU just doesn't seem to be performing the way it should. Needless to say, that it's crimping the performance of my brand new 9070 XT is extra frustrating. I'm planning to build a new machine eventually, but it's not in the budget for a while and I'd like to figure out what's wrong with this one first as I hope to sell it when I build a new one. I'm not sure if I still have AMD warranty coverage on this CPU and obviously, since things are stable, it'd likely be pulling teeth trying to file a claim with them without strong evidence.
Does anyone out there potentially have any ideas or has maybe seen this before? At this point, I'm willing to try just about anything, no matter how whacky. Is it possible the CPU could be defective, but only in this non-stability related way? I can't imagine so, but I've seen weirder things happen.
I appreciate any thoughts anyone has on the matter. Cheers everyone!
