I know this forum is for opinion/personal questions, however I have been all over the internet trying to find an answer to my problem, and I just want to see if you have seen something like this in the past.
My friend and I have nearly identical rigs, except the fact that I have marginally better components and I am clocked a bit higher. In benchmarks my rig destroys his, however if I try to play any game he will get at least 20/30% higher FPS than me. My in game FPS is so low that I cannot even play a lot of the newer games on the lowest settings. I thought this was due to my 8350 bottlenecking, but after he can set there with an 8320 playing Hawken at the capped 120FPS and I am struggling with 60, it gets very frustrating. I can also say that when I did a bit of Litecoin mining, my KH/s was that of a 280x instead of a 290x... but I had ignored that because apparently they can vary based on brand. I also get strange behavior with the latest games like CoD: AW. I cannot maintain typical FPS for a 290x at 1920x1080, however if I enable SMAA and 2x Supersampling I get absolutely no performance hit and I get the typical FPS (which would be okay if I had more than 50FPS in general).
Other forums tell me my GPU is faulty, but I don't understand this at all. In anything other than a game such as; 3D Mark, Furmark, Unigine Valley, Unigine Heaven, and Performance test, I get great scores that are higher than most 290x's. My CPU also gets great scores.
Here is what I have done to troubleshoot the issue:
Clean format of W7, W8, W8.1, W10 TP (which I am using now).
Reset to stock clocks on everything (made performance worse).
Checked my temps. Cores on CPU get around 45C, GPU gets to 90C (this is a reference 290x), North bridge gets to 60C, all withing reasonable levels.
Ensured nothing was throttling. Cores all stay at 4.7GHz, minimal Vdroop. GPU stays at 1050/1250MHz at 100% utilization.
Tried every single AMD driver known to man since the 290x was released, with proper junk removal.
So have any of you just seen a build that just flat out cannot play games as well as others, regardless of how well they score on benchmarks?
My rig:
AMD FX-8350 @ 4.7GHz w/ dual fanned Hyper 212-Evo
HIS AMD R9 290X Reference @ 1050MHz Core/1250MHz RAM
2 x 8Gb Team Vulcan @ 1866MHz
Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 Revision 4.0
Samsung 840 Evo 120Gb SSD (Linus baited me)
Caviar Blue 1Tb HDD
Toshiba 1Tb HDD
ATI All-In-Wonder TV tuner
Corsair 600T White edition
Corsair 750M
And my friend has the following:
AMD FX-8320 @ 4.4GHz w/ stock Hyper 212-Evo
ASUS AMD R9 290 Reference @ Stock clocks
1 x 8Gb Team Vulcan @ 1600MHz
Gigabyte 970A-UD3 Revision 1.0
Caviar Blue 1Tb
Fractal R4
Corsair 600M