I just do not understand what on earth is going on. It started in GTA V where the game started to perform like garbage, stuttering, jerky, frame rates going down in the toilet to around the 13 FPS mark with a GTX 980. Started to narrow things down like reinstalling nvidia drivers, trying different drivers, reinstalling the game, reinstalled windows, reinstalled windows on a different harddrive and the problem exists. Now all games are running with 3-13% GPU usage and the CPU hitting 70-80% usage in the games, even ran the games on lowest possible settings and made zero difference at all in running any game. Ran a windows test bench just to see if it was a harddrive failure as I thought it was the old ssd, and come to find the harddrive score was 7.9 and functioning normal !! the rest of the scores was 5.9 for the CPU and 7.3 for the RAM which also should be at 7.8 at least I'll do full specs below. I'm at a loss if its something to do with the motherboard, or the CPU or if its something else. the CPU temps are fine, there is nothing wrong there, about 58 degrees in GTA V, and the 980 is hovering around 70-74 degrees also, so I dunno if the motherboard itself is getting warm or what the case might be but I wouldn't think it would be a cooling issue, I got a full tower case with 7 fans, an Antec DF-85 (darkfleet).

Specs:

AMD FX 8320 @4.0ghz and 4.2ghz (tried both speeds to see if it made a difference)

MSI 970FX AM3+ Motherboard

16GB DDR3 1866 Gskill Ripjaws RAM

MSI GTX 980 OC (353.30 drivers)

Toshiba 128GB SSD

2x 1TB 7200 RPM Mechanical drives

Windows 7 x64 Ulitmate (freshly installed)

Now I know its not a bottleneck because this is my wifes machine, she has identicle setup as me all except the motherboard, mines an ASRock extreme 3 motherboard, not an MSI, but everything else is 100% identicle, CPU, RAM, GPU, powersupply and I run GTA at 60FPS, same for witcher 3 and ARK for example so its absolutely not a bottleneck with the CPU.

General running of the machine is perfect, windows and everything runs fine, just major lag which what I first thought was because the GPU usage was barely over 10%, but it might be something more serious! ANY suggestions please! Thanks....

Reseat the graphics card?

Possibly bad firmware on your GPU? Possibly a virus? I'm not much help in terms of how to troubleshoot but I can help throw out ideas of what the cause might be to get the gears rolling lol

@believer258: giving that a go now. thanks for the reply I'll report back

did you change Windows versions? The scaling for scoring shifted between Vista, 7 and 8.

@corvak: The scoring itself is not his core problem though; it is the performance he is receiving from his rig.

well just an FYI - Yes windows were the same versions. I know the windows score isn't really the best program to go by but its what I have for now

Sadly this did not change anything! the performance is just as it was before!

Does your motherboard have an integrated graphics chip? Is there a way to measure how much of an integrated chip is being used? If yes to both, perhaps try that and see if the integrated chip is also sitting at 10% or so - maybe this will help you determine if there's a configuration error or something somewhere. At the very least, we can be almost certain that the video card isn't the problem without putting it in a different PC.

Or, a less harebrained idea, perhaps try to make sure that your computer isn't, for some reason, trying to use integrated graphics instead of the graphics card. Or maybe that's a more harebrained idea, I'm really just throwing random stuff out there.

EDIT: What's your power supply? Either I missed it several times or you haven't listed it. 7 fans plus a 980 is kind of a lot.

@believer258: thanks for the reply I totally forgot about the PSU. It's a corsair 750watt. It also doesn't have have any sort of integrated gpu, it was my first thought personally as I thought it might be using that instead of the 980! But there is no onboard gpu.

@corvak: Didn't they just get rid of it completely with 8.1?

Do you have a clean(100% formatted) HD you can try? Reinstall windows from a fresh DVD, not pirated, download steam from steampowered.com and install whatever game. Just use windows updates WHQL driver. See if anything is different. Typically performance decreases like that are more likely due to a virus rather than a hardware issue. However check device manager and make sure nothing is failing to ID, no drivers are failing to start. If it's still the same make sure your temps are ok. If everything still checks out I'd try swapping hardware in/out to narrow it down. If you don't have any spare hardware I'd just recommend pulling everything(aside from mb, that can be done in case), blowing it out(if using a compressor w/o drier make sure you let them sit for 15-20 minutes to let water evaporate), reassemble and try a clean install again. You should just have one clean HD installed while trying this stuff to make sure nothing else is an issue. If it's STILL an issue, you have a hardware issue and you need to swap stuff in and out. Make sure you reset the bios and verify it's up to date when doing first install too.

@mb: @maginnovision: He said it's a new install of Windows.

Windows 8 lets you do a "refresh" of Windows 8 that basically reinstalls the OS but leaves your files and directories intact - does Windows 7 have something like this? I forget. In any case, was it a fresh install (that is, you formatted the HDD first) of a licensed copy of Windows? I assumed it was or I would have mentioned it earlier.

Any overclocking of the GPU/CPU? Reset those and see if it changes.

@mrcraggle: Did they? I decided to skip 8 once MS started talking about 10.

Also my bad, I missed the part where OP mentioned a performance hit, I thought it was just a lower score.

Thanks to everyone who replied just adding a quick reply. Yes when I reinstalled windows it was a fresh format of the drive and yes it's a true licensed version of windows 7 ultimate which at the time cost like 300$. I am in the process of doing another fresh install on a different SSD freshly formatted drive as well again incase that install got somehow corrupted on the install as well as downloading latest motherboard drivers from online.

I did mess around with the GPU over clocking settings and tried both over locking and down locking the thing as well as using Mai afterburner to give it more watt in case it wasn't getting enough but nothing worked or changed it. I also used nvidias DSR features to force games to use the gpu 100% which it does but the performance is just toilet.

Reason I mentioned the windows index score was because it gives me the impression the is something wrong with the CPU, the RAM has a low score as well compared to my machine and both have the same RAM in it too! So it's quite odd.

Anyway let's hope that this new install of windows again fixes the problem and thanks all for all advice!

Is the GPU down clocking itself? I know the 980's down clock when not under load, so maybe there is an issue with the card not reclocking itself under heavy usage? Have you tried the MSI OC software (nv just saw your last post?) Tried swapping the cards between the two builds? I would do that before re-installing windows again, seems like an issue with the card to me.

Since you have tried all else....I would do the rock bottom basics since you now have nothing to lose.

- Open up the machine and check all the connections..in fact unplug and plug back in everything. Make sure the cooler is attached well for the CPU. Check to see if any DIP switches are switched wrong....although I don't think your mobo has any DIPs.

- If you have a CMOS button press ist, if not go into your BIOs and reset it to factory.

- If possible see if there is a new BIOS you can install for the board.

- Set up the Mobo again at base setting no overclock ----- and for the LOVE OF GOD don press the OC Genie . Those instant OC firmware things suck shit and can mess you up.

- Setup the BIOs again with just standard parameters and give the case a good look...all the fans spinning, all the button chirping as expected.

Now test everything again....see if the results are better.

Actually, I just read "CPU" windows score I thought GPU, it'll be a pain in the ass but after you do what everyone says with resetting/updating the bios I would take that processor out and put it in your build and test it. If it gives you some fucked up performance you'll know whether it's bad or not, and that would give you a better basis for testing further.

@vackillers: Huh, odd. You're forced to part swap like @mb said; it's the only way to be sure. My money is also on the PSU; CPUs don't really up and die like this, although it could be a problem with the motherboard itself, though that is more rare than a PSU issue.

Have you tried different GPU driver?

I always mark the good gpu drivers i tried to roll back to them whenever i find an issue with my GPU.

Everyone here is scaring the shit out of me. Can you please give us some background. Did this just start happening out of nowhere? Do you turn your computer off every night? Was it running for days at a time? Was there a power surge? Did you do any recent driver/system/windows updates?

But first, thing, check the windows event viewer and look for application and system errors, specifically related to driver issues, system failures, etc. Do you see anything there? Even after a reformat, if there is currently a problem, you should see errors.

Also, run a system diagnostic report which is in Performance Monitor in windows 7. Does it pop up with hardware issues?

It's best to gather data before you start doing random things.

Then let us know.

Ok guys I would love to take this time to thank absolutely everyone in this thread for all ideas on trying to solve my particular issue. You guys have been just awesome.

I just did a lot of stuff over this past weekend (now sunday) and I just want to give an update of what I have tried and what I found what looks like to be the main problem now. I just reinstalled a brand new windows, on a nice fresh SSD, after all windows updates, trying a different driver the issue persisted. So at this point I was thinking I pretty much narrowed it all down to a "hardware" issue and began testing. Did mem and CPU stress tests, I actually used a proper CPU stress test this time not the WIE thingi, I used prime95 for 3 hours, 100% clear. Switched out the GPU for my old GTX 760 which now appears to be fried!!! so I then had to put an even older GPU which was the GTX 560 ti. Ran games and bam, in ARK it hit 100% on the GPU, and much lower on the CPU, I was thinking AHHH okay this is probably whats wrong then, loaded up GTA V, and woops.... same issue! GPU did not go beyond 40% usage with various settings ranging from normal/high and cpu was back at around 70% but it was even being dipped into the 59% range which is lower than MINE! but the fact that an older card, a much! older card wouldn't be pushed to 100% on GTA got me thinking its not the card again.... Checked the CPU temps again, and too good to be true temps with prime95 running 100% on my cpu, temps did not go above 25 degrees! should be a lot hotter than that..... loaded up CPU-Z and bam, there is the problem...... clock speed is 1399mhz not the 4.0 it should be.... the multiplier locked at 7.5x - 20.0.

Basically the motherboard is either massively downclocking the CPU and i need to find exactly what setting to change in order to fix that if its a power saving setting or the mobo is in fact faulty now. I have no BSOD, no windows ERROR, event viewer completely clear of errors, device manage is clear except from a couple usb ports which I think might be because of the case but not getting any random freezes, crashes or system hangs leads me to believe the CPU is actually still good. I'm still working on it but will post a screenshot of my CPU-Z diagnostic when i get that machine back on the network.

EDIT: here is the CPU-Z details

I had something similar happen to me when i first tried overclock my 8350, my suggestion would be to manual clock it to the stock speed in bios and turn off the auto and some of the power saving settings. You may know more about it than me, but there is good info in some old overclocking threads online about it (well from years ago when i did it).

POSSIBILITY OF IT SOLVED!

I had to do a lot of reboots for various reboots but I had to turn off cool and quiet settings (which should have been off anyway) Turn of AMD Turbo settings / Manually reset the multiplier back off auto to 20x and I had to disable "CPU Smart Protection". CPU running now running at 4.0ghz and GTA V is very smooth even with the GTA 560 ti which is hell supprising! but once I reset the GTX 980 back in there I'll update again just to make sure that it is actually fixed and I'm preying it is.... AGAIN! I would like to thank each and every one of you who replied because I had zero luck of getting any replies on other forums! except the usual the AMD cpus suck, go buy an intel.... I appreciate all the time and effort you guys took to not only read my woes, but take the time to suggest things..... what else is there to say, the giantbomb community just blows every other community away.... thank you

PS. I just hope that one day if anyone else has these issues in the future that this thread may help others solve similar issues as well... This took a bit of finding because of the UEFI bios which I'm only used to using old school bios and not having used an MSI board before, the layout was vastly different and thought I had disabled all possible power saving shit... turned out, it was probably never ever disabled since I put the thing together in the first place!

Edit: WEI Score 7.7 now.

Final update: After re-setting the 980 back in everything still stayed fixed. So it was indeed down to the motherboard throttling the CPU to go past 25 degrees it seems after disabling a few things in the bios now the CPU is now fixed and back to how it should be performing.

personally, i would never run WEI.

You seem to have a legitimate performance issue though, but still, i'd probably use 3dmark instead, since it is a more reputable and meaningful benchmark.

Like @monkeyking1969 has suggested, i would reset cmos to get the cpu running with default settings, and go from there.

@devildoll: Yeah resetting the cmos was something i did just after I re did windows. All issues are fixed though now, getting a nice 60+ fps in GTA V at near max settings now. Everythings running perfectly.