Does my PC perform as it should?

[Sezuka]

Hey there,
I can't help but feel that my PC is underperforming by quite a big amount.
The specs of my PC are:
i7 920 (Stock clocking, need to OC it but I recieved a defected cooler and just haven't been bothered to get it changed, lazy idd. This might be the bottleneck but I wouldn't think it would matter so much.)
8GB of 1600MHz DDR3 RAM
HD5970*
My games and system are ran on a 500GB 7200rpm HDD that is getting somewhat old, but if I am not very wrong that would only affect load times and not actual ingame performance.
*The HD5970 might be a problem, seeing as I have had some weird graphical issue with this card. It's hard to explain, but textures get extremely messed up, mainly in games that are DX10 or below, and also when I enable DX11 in WoW the problem disappears and my fps is boosted by quite a bit. DX11 games sometimes get other weird graphical errors but not as noticeable. If you want, I can provide pictures of this graphical error tomorrow.

The games I have numbers from in my head atm are WoW and Rift.
I would think my system would run WoW no problem with all-maxed settings at high FPS, yet I need to turn shadows completely off to get over 60 fps in low-pop areas, and in places like Org with some people I am at around 40 fps normally. Seems low for my system.

Rift is not DX11 afaik, and in that game I had to go a bit under the highest preset settings to run at a stable 50+ fps. Everything maxed gave me around 20-30 and highest preset around 30-40. I read that people with worse GPU and less RAM than me ran this game much better. Seems kinda weird.

Looking at some performance monitors, I rarely ever see my RAM or CPU usage go any high at all, so it might be something with the GPU?

Anyways, I am not on that PC right now so I can't give you much more info at this moment, but if there is anything you want me to try (Benchmarks etc), let me know and I will have a look at it tomorrow. Also, let me know if there is any info that I forgot, other parts etc.

Thanks,
Sezuka

[Nickle]

The easiest thing to do would be to update your drivers if you haven't already.

What are the temperatures on your graphics card? Sounds like you might have some artifacting, which could mean your cards on its way out.

But your card should destroy WoW on full settings...

[Sezuka]

I might need to look into getting that card replaced. :<

It's not overheating though, the temps are normal. I'll provide a picture of that problem tomorrow, don't have any on this PC.

Edit: Drivers are up-to-date as well, with the newest CrossFire profiles. The graphical problem has been there through several driver versions.

[vesseblah]

Strange artifacts on screen is most likely due to graphics card overheating. Also you might want to try WoW with crossfire disabled, since it's still incompatible with CF and can lead to framerate loss instead of gain, especially on 4k/5k cards.

In your case you'd get pretty nice boost in WoW's performance from overclocking the CPU, i7-920 is pretty slow out of the box, and 30% OC there means 30% higher framerate for WoW in raids and busy places.

[Darkan]

It is probably not overheating its just the fact that it is a 2 GPU Card. It is hit or miss with Crossfire and SLI playing wow some people swear it works some people have all kinds of problems. Unfortunatly u seem to be the latter. ... And the 40 FPS in crowded cities is a CPU bottleneck not GPU

[Sezuka]

Well the thing about my GPU is that the weird stuff happens in several games, and only DX11 seems to make it go away.

Here is a screenshot (Can be large):
http://i56.tinypic.com/15pk9bp.jpg
As you can see, textures sort of get dragged out. Could happen anywhere with anything in any game, and is definitely not overheating.

I did clock my CPU up to around 3.3GHz, noticed a bit of an improvement so I probably need to get my CPU cooler replaced (Noctua has nice warranty so should be np ) and clock it up to around 4-4.2, and that would give me quite an improvement.

Edit: The graphical error does also happen in games that support CrossFire (TF2).

[DeltrusDisc]

You still haven't given any specific temps on your graphics card, it would be helpful to provide us with the current temps you are having shown with a program such as SpeedFan 4.41. I'd suggest posting both GPU temp and CPU temp. Especially if you have a faulty CPU cooler it could be letting your CPU get to some fairly dangerous temperatures that could affect the overall performance for your computer. But yeah I agree with the above posters that your computer should eat WoW alive at max settings, honestly I have a strong feeling that if it is not a drivers problem it is overheating problems. Just post the damned temps already! :P

[Sezuka]

Temps while in the middle of org and some multitaking:
CPU 65-70C spread on cores, it's OCed atm though (Noctua NH-D14 should really keep it a looooooot lower so gotta get it fixed) - bit much so I'll probably clock it down again. That's around 15-20% load btw, so the temps are high on cpu atm yeah.
GPU 70-75C - pretty normal from what I read, maybe a bit high for 55-60% load?

Edit: Can also add I tried disabling Catalyst A.I which iirc does disable CrossFire, no difference.

[DeltrusDisc]

Temps while in the middle of org and some multitaking:
CPU 65-70C spread on cores, it's OCed atm though (Noctua NH-D14 should really keep it a looooooot lower so gotta get it fixed) - bit much so I'll probably clock it down again. That's around 15-20% load btw, so the temps are high on cpu atm yeah.
GPU 70-75C - pretty normal from what I read, maybe a bit high for 55-60% load?

Edit: Can also add I tried disabling Catalyst A.I which iirc does disable CrossFire, no difference.

Okay, I've been told my numbers are pushing the standard of "high" at ~50C for CPU and ~55-65C for GPU. You should (if you don't already), manually turn the fan up on your video card to around 85% fan speed. Most likely your fan is not going too fast at the moment, I know before I learned about RivaTuner for NVidia cards my card was cooking and now it sits around upper 40s to 52C during WoW!

Your CPU temperature frightens me.

[Dassen]

Okay, I've been told my numbers are pushing the standard of "high" at ~50C for CPU and ~55-65C for GPU. You should (if you don't already), manually turn the fan up on your video card to around 85% fan speed. Most likely your fan is not going too fast at the moment, I know before I learned about RivaTuner for NVidia cards my card was cooking and now it sits around upper 40s to 52C during WoW!

Your CPU temperature frightens me.

65-70 is scary? Try hitting 106 degrees celcius while playing WoW. I have not been that scared before in my life, ever.

[Sezuka]

Okay, I've been told my numbers are pushing the standard of "high" at ~50C for CPU and ~55-65C for GPU. You should (if you don't already), manually turn the fan up on your video card to around 85% fan speed. Most likely your fan is not going too fast at the moment, I know before I learned about RivaTuner for NVidia cards my card was cooking and now it sits around upper 40s to 52C during WoW!

Your CPU temperature frightens me.

I was looking to change the speed of my GPU fan manually in ATi AMD () CCC as it is indeed only at 30%, but can't find it anymore. :S

And it's now down to around 50-60C. The main problem now, that just helps prove that my cooler is defected (Looking away at the fact that at this clocking it should be at more like 30-40C) is how two cores are at around 50C and the other two are at around 58C. Obviously broken. I will change to stock cooler again asap and get this cooler sent back, should have done this nearly a year ago but I have been extremely lazy about it.

65-70 is scary? Try hitting 106 degrees celcius while playing WoW. I have not been that scared before in my life, ever.

At a LAN I once made us sit in the cold with all windows open so my CPU wouldn't overheat and turn off.

When I got home I had a look at it and there were dust the size of wool-dots in the cooler .... computer geek horror story?

[DeltrusDisc]

I was looking to change the speed of my GPU fan manually in ATi AMD () CCC as it is indeed only at 30%, but can't find it anymore. :S

And it's now down to around 50-60C. The main problem now, that just helps prove that my cooler is defected (Looking away at the fact that at this clocking it should be at more like 30-40C) is how two cores are at around 50C and the other two are at around 58C. Obviously broken. I will change to stock cooler again asap and get this cooler sent back, should have done this nearly a year ago but I have been extremely lazy about it.



At a LAN I once made us sit in the cold with all windows open so my CPU wouldn't overheat and turn off.

When I got home I had a look at it and there were dust the size of wool-dots in the cooler .... computer geek horror story?

My god your poor computer. What's the hotline for computer abuse?!?!

[Sezuka]

Ok, so, new update.

After a looot of searching, I found that to make manual fan control work on the 5970 you need a BIOS update.

Now you might be able to imagine that since I am writing about it, something went wrong.

I'll copy+paste what I wrote in my ticket to XFX (Although it's just erroring for me atm.)

Hey there,
Today I found that I could not manually control the fan of my XFX HD5970 BE, and after a lot of searching I found that I should update the BIOS of my GPU. I came to the 'atiflash -p <gpu_number> <bios_file_name>' part of the process, where I was supposed to type 102 in the end of the file name and accidentaly typed 103, which was from the name of the slave core. When I start my PC now I only hear a beeping sound that lasts about a second and obviously no picture, so I am wondering if you could help me out on reverting my BIOS. I did do a backup as the 'README' file suggests.

I highly appreciate any help in this matter!

Small problems develop so fast. :<

Will really appreciate some help right now, gonna look at it tomorrow with my dad but if anyone has any tips then please let me know.

[DeltrusDisc]

First advice, type slower and triple check what you type into coding! >_<

[Sezuka]

Well I fixed the flash, and I want to blame XFX's horrible instructions for messing it up in the first place.