Hopefully this wasn't the wrong spot of the forums to post in. If I am wrong I apologize in advance..
In any case I built my system just this past March during tax time and it seems like everything went to hell in a handbag overnight. I can't figure out what the cause of my issues are, and I've tried many different things.... First the specs of the system are:
I am running Win 7 Ultimate 64 bit. Seems like only a few days ago, ALL of the games I play had a drastic drop in FPS. I couldn't understand why, I thought maybe I had some bad malware or spyware so I ran a virus scan multiple times in safe mode... and the scans found nothing. I did a fresh install of the OS, and still the problem persists. I reset the BIOS to it's factory default settings, cleaned the system of all dust (which, there was barely any dust to begin with), made sure all my connections were secure in my system and tried once again... still, with no results. Temps on my hardware are fine, so throttling isn't the issue here... I'm at a loss, really can't figure this out. Any help is appreciated...
What changed recently. Drivers update for Amd or Windows updates. It is possible that the psu may be falling short. I would look at drivers and windows updates closely first. Default Catalyst Control Center and closely check all graphic related settings for a misconfig. Wiping your system should be a last resort. So ? Try not to do that first.
Huh...check this out. I ran the windows update diagnositc, and before that I had only 4 important updates. Now I have 132? I did have issues before installing updates. It failed when I started up and windows gave a message that said reverting changes. I ran the diagnostic though and it seems to have fixed my issue with that. As for the drivers I'm using, I use the most current version of catalyst control center available... so I don't think that is the case. Then again I'm no expert
Also make sure all drivers for all things are fully updated. The manufacturer is usually the best source. Sometimes i get lazy tho and use stuff like this. http://forums.iobit.com/forum/general-forums/news-offers/207976-driver-booster-3-0-beta-1-3-0-0-240-is-released-june-17-2015-updated-to-version-3-0-0-251-july-03-2015 but be very careful during install to install only that as they like to bundle bloatware with things of this nature.( Edit: I use stuff like driver booster to speed up first installs but i usually uninstall it afterwords because most driver updates come out at a much slower pace once you get everything up to date or have their own updating system. )
So even after the updates my performance is still horrendous. I.e league of legends starts @ 60fps, drops down to 20-30 during lane phase/teamfights. WoW is having issues as well, all of my games were running fine 1 week ago. I have no idea what could be wrong, I've tried everything under the sun at this point and now I'm starting to think it might be a hardware issue. Great...
You know with all the recent changes in drivers, you may have to go into the game settings and adjust them. I suggest you retune the game's settings. You have a fresh install, no malware issues, and updated drivers. Retune your graphic settings and the game settings for each game. Your fps sounds about right for most mmos type games at stock with no tuning for an 8350 and 290x. Tuning your ingame graphics will yield better results. Real-time monitoring of in-game temps/ under heavy load is recommended.
I have to say I disagree. I was having much better performance just a week prior to the recent collapse of my system. League of Legends and World of Warcraft should run at a solid 60fps at all times on this system (save for heavy raiding in WoW at times). The recommended default settings are all High or Very High so I really don't have to change my settings too much. This is frustrating
I thought that my SSD might have been failing so I swapped it out for a spare I had. No performance increase at all. I then swapped processors to see if it would make a difference, I used a 6300 for the swap... still absolutely no difference at all. I'm grasping at straws here, I thought initially it was a software issue but I've updated everything and can find no reason for my software to be hindering my hardware. Any thoughts? This is a pretty frustrating ordeal
Try rolling back your drivers, occasionally a bad batch of drivers can be sent out that will create problems in some older games. If that has no effect, personally my next step would be to reinstall windows itself. If at last you're still having issues, the first suspect to me in a low gaming performance issue would probably be the graphics card.
There was something strange that happened recently with the FX-8320 that I can't pin point. For some reason all my games took a massive performance hit, dropping frames and stuttering all over the place, only a select few were fine... I have no clue what happened since encoding and rendering were about the same. I just build a new rig to solve the issue, lol.
Rig might not be fucked, run Prime95 to see if any errors show up. But it might be something else.
Yeah, this too is what I am afraid of. I'm still a bit of a newbie so would you know of a manner in which I can diagnose the card itself? And thanks I will try that out Ace
Run a benchmark on the card with Unigene or something else, if it checks out fine, then run a stress test on it with OCCT or Furmark to see if there is something else wrong.
Use AMD Overdrive (or AIDA64) to monitor both your temperatures and clockrates - perhaps there is throttling of some sort going on. Could be either your GPU or CPU.
(Insufficient data to make an assessment.)
What are you using for Cooling? What version drivers are you using?