hi! i recently upgraded from a radeon hd 6870 to a geforce 770. whenever i boot up any games such as splinter cell black list and borderlands 2 they are automatically set for ultra. bu tfor what ever reason they are still laggy and unresponsive. my cpu is an amd fx-4100 4 core overclocked to 3.8ghz. its at this point a 2 year old cpu . so my question is is this the problem? i have 8gb of ram, and i know these numbers aren't really useful but my hdd scores the lowest on the windows experience index at a 5.9. even though i have the stock heat sink on it my cpu runs pretty cool averaging between 30 and 40 C .

if any one has any ideas i would appreciate it i cant think of any.

I don't mean to ask the obvious, but it's the best place to start: are all of your drivers up to date?

unless i am totally missing an obvious one yes i think so

Your specs sound fine and they aren't even the most demanding games and your temp readings are fine too. The only thing I can think to recommend is to make sure you've completely removed your old drivers and maybe redoing the thermal paste on the CPU. I redid mine a couple of months ago and it fixed so many issues I was having for far too long.

Well at first blush that cpu/gpu combo is a mismatch. That's a budget cpu, and an older one, with a pretty top of the line gpu. I'd install the GeForce experience for an easy way to check your gpu drivers and maybe try some nvidia control panel editing (forcing vsync, threaded optimization, performance mode, etc). If you're still having issues it might be time to buy a new cpu that compliments the rest of your rig.

i would like to get the latest i7. but i would have to get a new mobo for that and i cand afford that. so i guess i will just get the newest fx 8 core

It is a bottleneck but i would check drivers and turn off things like v sync and phsix to see if they were causing the lag before droping money on a new cpu/mobo/ram.

@mattimus_prime: You could also try setting the CPU clock speeds back to the default. Even though it seems like there's obviously no overheating problem, I've seen that cause problems for people in this situation.

dust off your CPU radiator. Heat management can make your PC slow as hell

Yes.

Well, the 4100 is the weakest of the Bulldozer-based CPUs. There are eight others in that class of CPU with better specs than the 4100, so I wouldn't expect miracles here. That being said, get yo drivers up to date, check yo clocks, check yo temps and clean out yo puter and see what happens.

The GTX 770 is a pretty hefty GPU by today's standards, the 4100 is a pretty weak CPU by 2011's standards.

i looked up a couple of different reviews, basically, the 4100 should be good for any game, cept battlefield 3-4, as well as super cpu intensive strategy games, like SC2 on ultra cpu settings.

Anandtech

Guru3D

Legit reviews

Sweclockers

The common thread is that, while the 4100 is usually in the lower or bottom of the bunch, where most cpu's can spit out 60 frames per second, the 4100 can too.

Im pretty sure borderlands 2 shouldnt be a problem, cant speak for Splinter cell though.

Cosidering that you updated from an AMD to an Nvidia video card perhaps the drivers for your AMD card might still be in the system and perhaps causing a conflict. That's just a wild guess though since that's the other thing that stands out to me and the other duders here have already given their suggestions as well.

GaspoweR is about spot on here I think, you'll need to use a program called driver sweeper in safe mode in order to completely remove and uninstall everything with the old AMD card, that appears to be the only way to completely remove those drivers which "DO" cause this sort of issue. Friend of mine upgrades to a GTX 760 after having his dual ATI 5870s in crossfire and ran into the same problem. Make sure you really are using the latest nvidia drivers, i would remove those as well and reinstall them also. I hear the latest nvidia beta drivers are best for the 7 series Nvidia cards, fixes a few issues.

after doing all of that I am still having problems. I noticed the frame rate will jump to like 100+ then drop to single digits . I an going to get a new heat sink and redo my thermal paste and hope that helps