I know this is a tech question, but I am desperate

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

Have you ran any stress test on your rig like memtest and prime95 to see if the issue is non GPU related?

Also why are you using W10 on metal? It isn't ready to be a daily driver. 

The ATI capture card might conflict with your GPU try it with out that.

What are all your system temps when loaded? It may be over heating due to poor thermal paste and heat sink mounting.

also, calm down it is just a video game don't be desperate.

Yes I have done stability tests and nothing appears to be wrong.

I just wanted to try it out, and I haven't had any additional issues since installing it. I think at this point it's just a reskinned 8.1.

I will try removing the TV tuner and see if that helps.

My temps seem to be fine under stress. (45C on CPU Cores, 90C on GPU, 65C on Northbridge)

It's just frustrating as I cannot even play a game as simple as LoL and utilize my 144Hz monitor.

I would swap over to 8 due to driver support.

MATE! :D Tek questions are Welcome here at TekSyndicate :D  and Don't be sorry for asking!!! if you don't ask you will never get an answer :3

Dude , you NEED to configure more than 60 hz on your monitor , for 60hz + you NEED a dual link dvi ( make sure you have a dual ) or a display port monitor .

You then need to go into the catalist control center , and set the refresh rate to 144 / 120 / 110 ( I had to do this for my 3D monitor , otherwise the frames capped at 60 , and dropped to 50 .

My monitor is set up for 144Hz and it I am running DL DVI.

This is my PC not being able to put out 144FPS on even the lightest games.

I would seek to get back to basics here:

1.Revert back to win 7 or 8.1.

2. Remove excess devices from your PC

3. Use heaven or similar to validate your card well output at 144hz

4. Ask your mate if a temporary gfx card swap can be done; how does it perform in his system, how about his in yours?

 

 

1 and 2. Will do

3. It outputs to 144Hz fine, I was just saying that I couldn't utilize it because I was getting something only 70FPS in games like LoL, CS: GO, Dota 2, etc. Games that should easily run at 144FPS.

4. He moved out of state. I may swap a GTX 760 out and see what happens later today.

I've just been thinking about this some more. The few times  I have had really weird problems that I couldn't solve straight away have been traced back to:

1. BIOS setting or need for update

2. A failing hard drive

3. A failing power supply

Have you also checked your system and application event logs for errors?

You could also try using something like PAL to capture and analyse perfmon data to see where you might have CPU, disk or Memory bottlenecks (No perfmon counters for GPU's unfortunately). https://pal.codeplex.com/

If you have been using IntelBurnTest to stress your system make sure you set Stress Level to custom and set the memory size to near to your system Ram. The test will take longer but will fully utilise your memory.

 

Also, if you use the Heaven Benchmark 4.0 you should definitely see that get to 144 FPS especially if you set the detail level etc. to low to start off with. 

Okay I swapped out the 290x for a GTX 760 and I am getting slightly lower average framerates for a massively more consistent experience. Certain areas of the run has my 290x in the 30s which makes the game look like console shit.

 

I did the following benchmark on CoD:AW on Traffic, with the identical route that Linus uses with a few settings turned down (shadows, hbao+)

GTX 760 Min Max Avg:

45, 151, 85.492

290X Min Max Avg:

25, 270, 102.844

Linus 290X Min Max Avg:

85, 291, 125

At least now I can completely rule out the CPU bottleneck, as the game played silky smooth on the 760.

I am guessing that it is thermal throttling on the 290x. Monitor the temps of the gpu core and the vrms while gaming along with the clock speeds and utilization

 

OK, sounds like you are narrowing down on the problem area. Can you use MSI afterburner to see what your GFX card usage si doing when you are playing - compare the 760 to 290X for the same game etc. Does its usage dip when the FPS stalls? 

If its not an overheating issue then I wonder if it's the PSU.

Okay I didn't have my fan speeds set up correctly. It was set at 30% and was downclocking the core.

I resetup my fan profile and the core stayed at 1050MHz the entire time. Lower average. Same issue with several spots on the map just killing the FPS. My card ran 10C cooler this run.

290X Min Max Avg:

39, 220, 90.679

If the PSU is not providing adequate power, would it downclock the GPU?

That's interesting, I would be inclined to try and test the 290 in another machine if posible. You would expect better results if the core stayed at 1050Mhz - it might now be time to use MSI afterburner and see if its utilisation stays high or drops when the FPS drops.

Do you also have anything else running in the background? If you want to try running your game with processor affinity to 1 core per module just open task manager once it is running select the details tab, find the game and then right click and set affinity. Untick CPU 0 and all the even CPU's. Now if there is something else running it will likely be scheduled on CPU 0 or another unused CPU. This setting will revert once you quit/restart the game.

BTW this is a useful way to see what a CPU bottleneck looks like on a graphics card; Load Unigine Heaven and set it to only one CPU whilst running and watch your GPU usage plummet in Afterburner. You can then add CPU's back one at a time whilst it is running to see the FPS and GPU usage go back up.

 

The utilization stays at 100% most of the time, a few times it dips to the 80%. I can't really tell if it is linked to the FPS drops.

The only thing that was running in the background was Steam.

I will try the affinity thing later tonight.

gpu-z. My money is on the VRM temp. I have the same card as you. Throttled all the time. That card sucks more juice than a baby from his moms... well you get the picture. however i changed the gpu-cooler to actic cooling Arctic Cooling Accelero Hybrid. Fine temps and no issues. VRM is the key. mine overheated to 120 degrees celsius. Could problably make good noodles on that temperature. So double check your temps with gpu-z

Sounds like the card is working now then without bottlenecking or thermal throttling. It's still strange that the minimums are lower  than your mates machine or when you have the 760 installed.

The affinity thing is fun to play around with - you can do silly things like having IntelBurnTest maxing out 4 cores whilst you have other things running without breaking sweat. It's a cool way to demonstrate the value of an i7 or an FX8xxx processor or to simulate starving a process of multiple cores.