upgraded my PC, now it runs like garbage

Hi All,

I've recently upgraded a bunch of components in my PC and now it runs really poorly. Stutters, takes ten times longer to boot up, reduced frame rates in-game etc. I've tried a few basic things to improve performance but had little or no success. Iv'e updated all the drivers, stopped a bunch of programs starting on boot up, etc

PC specs

Intel Core i9 9900K

Gigabyte Z390 AORUS ULTRA LGA 1151 ATX Motherboard

Corsair Vengeance LPX 64GB

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1060 WINDFORCE 6GB

Corsair RM-650 650W 80 PLUS Gold Power Supply

Cooler Master Seidon 120XL Liquid Cooling Solution

These upgrades weren't all done together so there are a few older parts in there like the power supply and cooling, but everything else is less than 6 months old. The most recent upgrades being the i9 and Z390 and an extra 32gb of RAM. Oh, I also bought a new ASUS ROG Swift PG279Q monitor.

So i'm pretty new to building/upgrading PC as I'm just getting back in to it after years on console and this is the first time I've really don't anything myself. (Previously just bought stuff pre-built) So am I missing something here? Did i completely f*ck up on specs? Do I need more power? I ran everything pcpartpicker to check compatibility and it came back ok.

Please help duders because I'm out of ideas.

Thank you in advance.

Mic

As someone who actually paired a 9900K with a 1060 while waiting to get my 2080 Ti in the mail, a 1060 is not a card that's built for 1440p. So, you've got a major GPU bottleneck going on.

Also, why a 9900K? Plan on doing some form of content creation on YouTube and Twitch? And 64GBs of RAM. You into using virtual machines?

I can't speak to boot times but as far as games go if you are trying to run 1440 with that new monitor that 1060 is gonna run into problems left and right. It may work with tweaking but it's never gonna feel great.

I would try a fresh install of Windows.

@efesell: @facelessvixen: Thank you for your reply. That was definitely what I was afraid of.

I was planning on holding off getting a new card but I guess I'll have to. 9900K was basically just future-proofing. Difference in price wasn't much so I figured I'd stick it in and hope for the best. I'd burnt out my old board so had to replace it anyway. And for the 64GB of RAM, that's just what I run in my work laptop so it seemed like the right amount.

Probably should've done a bit more research, but I'm an new dad with very little spare time so I just googled "best PC parts for gaming" and ran with it. I'd just hoped that if i got higher-end components they'd just work. Very foolish of me I know but you live and learn i guess. Luckily I still have my previous monitor so I'll just use that while I sort out a new graphics card.

Thank you again for taking the time to reply. Now to find a card that will do the job..........(any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.)

@casepb: Thanks. I'll try that too!!

Did you swap out the motherboard and CPU but keep the old Windows install around?

If so, I'd definitely do a fresh install. There are so many driver changes that come with a new mobo you're almost always better off starting fresh and getting rid of the old cruft.

@mic_d: Yeah I have a sort of interim 1060 trying to make 1440 work as well and it's doable it's not a total catastrophe. You are however just gonna have to be willing to deal with a lot of like.. 45 fps situations at the most.

@frytup: I did a fresh install of windows. The previous version i had was an upgrade from win8 and it was locked to my old board.

@efesell: 45-55fps seems to be as far as i can push it but I haven't really tested it properly yet. Just playing some PUBG last night and that was about average of what i was getting.

@mic_d: To be honest, you probably should have asked us for recommendations so we could tailor something for your use case, intentions and lifestyle, and maybe also teach you a few things to avoid falling into beginner's traps such as "future proofing"; granted that I have a more conservative mindset in that I try to accurately estimate what a person needs to play games at a desired resolution, like 1080p, 1440p or 2160p, desired frame rate, and graphics settings, instead of just saying "Smoke 'em if you got 'em" even if you can give Newegg or Amazon a blank check.

So, since it seems that you're intention is to just play games:

• If you're not already married to that 9900K, I'd return it and step down to an i7-8700K for $350. You'll basically get the same level of performance for all intents and purposes and be able to put the $150 price difference to something more important. Not to gate keep, but I label CPUs like the 9900K, AMD's 3900X, and thousand dollar CPUs like AMD's Threadripper and Intel's X series of CPUs to be more tailored for content creators and 3D modeling; very high performance metrics that games alone will almost never fully utilize. Or another words: Diminishing returns.

• 16GBs of RAM is as much as you'd need for a "just gaming" PC. With the intent of just playing games, RAM affects the ability to multitask, which you don't do much of while playing a game. If anything, you'd really have to go out of your way to max out 16GBs of RAM, let alone 64 or even 32, so returning some RAM might also be an option because again, diminishing returns.

• If you haven't already, I'd get an M.2 SSD of at least 250GB in size for Windows and programs. Of course you can go larger and install games onto it that have exceptionally long loading times, but loading games form a 7200 RPM hard drive works well enough in most cases; still faster than consoles in some cases.

• And as for which GPU to best pair with that monitor: well, a 2080 Ti kinda makes sense for the sake of getting games to hit that maximum 165Hz refresh rate as closely as possible, with exceptions that kinda make the for $1,200 to $1,300 investment feel not worth it at times because of the, yet again, diminishing returns. But for just getting higher than 60 frames with high settings, I say either a 2070 Super or a 2080 Super and, again, put the $400 to $500 price difference to something more important.

@facelessvixen: You're totally right. I should've reached out earlier. An expensive mistake on my part no doubt.

I think I'm pretty much stuck with the i9 and RAM due to the returns policy of the place I purchased them. I didn't mention this earlier but I do 3d modelling for a living (CAD stuff) so if i want to switch over from my (work supplied) laptop to this one it'll be ready. So I don't feel like its a complete waste, just maybe premature. I do have a 500GB SSD which holds OS and currently played games but I can't remember the spec.

Definitely going to check out some 2070 and 2080 cards. Thank you.

The 1060 is a massive bottle neck. Woulda stuck woth 16gigs of ram and used the money saved on a 2070 or 2080

@mic_d: Well in that case, going for 64GBs of RAM and a 9900K makes a lot more sense given that CAD is the intention in addition to games. And I would actually look into how well a 2080 Ti, or even an RTX Titan performs with your CAD software of choice if high-end hardware can speed up your workflow, since CAD seems to scale well with expensive hardware (I'm personally more experienced with the content creation side of things with graphic design and video editing, so CAD is a little outside of my realm of knowledge as far as performance goes) and your workstation is a source of income.

So, yeah. It turns out that you're on the right track for a decent workstation. Pop in a 2080 Ti and you should be good to go for business and pleasure for a number of years.

Happy to help.

Well, I hope it works out. I think everyone else has been more helpful for advice.

The one thing you mention that worries me is that it takes 10x longer to boot up. Did you have a superfast boot up before and now 20 secs seems like a long time, or are we talking 2-3 mins to boot? With a fresh install of Windows and the OS on an SSD that shouldn't be happening. You might want to run a stress test on your RAM, just in case, and check on anything running in the background. Probably not your RAM, as you'd be having other issues, but it doesn't hurt to check.

Did you take the plastic off the CPU cooler? How are temps?

Several others have mentioned this already, but if you've replaced the motherboard without reinstalling Windows, you will typically run into a myriad of weird issues. You may also consider running hardware diagnostics to eliminate that possibility.

@mic_d: May be a sound / network conflict. Any unusual sound digitizing that go along with your slowdowns that sometimes get cleaned up when you reboot, reoccur when you have a lot of sound/network activity?

In general, look in your device manager and see if anything has a yellow "!".

As others have said, that's a wild amount of ram. I doubt this is a hardware issue, you don't need a 2080ti, for instance, for your pc to not run like shit.

Well before you start listening to stuff about bottlenecks, are your drivers up to date? Are you running it off a standard hdd and if so that could be the issue with load times. And make sure games are running at 1080p and not 1440p and see if you are still having issues (also adjust settings to medium/high etc).

And yeah, don't be afraid to ask for help. I have a 6600k and a gtx 1080 and run games 60fps + at 1440 pretty easy (although I haven't tried a high end game in a year or so, so that could be a bit less now).

For me the rule of thumb for gaming is, the GPU is king. I think anything around an i5 will be fine for games as long as you get a good gpu. Now if you can afford a better cpu then get it, I don't feel like "bottleneck" will ever really be an issue unless your running a gpu from more than 2 generations ago. (but I could be wrong). I think the Cpu will often add about 5-10fps on high intense games if you have a top of the line gpu, but that's about it really.

@oursin_360 said:

There's also a pretty harsh difference between a 1060 and a 1080 trying to run 1440.

yeah of course, my point was he could have saved on the motherboard/processor and got a better card.

Everyone's advice in this thread is spot on.

In addition to that advice, in regards to boot times, here are some things to point out:

1. Do a fresh install of the OS and put it on an SSD if possible.
2. Check if fast startup is enabled in windows 10. That may improve things.
3. Is the boot time taking a while even after seeing MoBo splash screen? Or is it the initial waiting period just waiting to see that Aorus logo? You may not like hearing this, but I have an Aorus board, and the boot times to get the motherboard to post are atrocious. Once you get past that initial post screen though, the boot time is just as speedy as I'd expect it to be.

Thanks for all the great advice everyone. Pretty much decided to go with the 2080 ti. I mean, I'm already so deep in at this point I may as well finish the job.

Just to answer a few of the commonly asked questions above....

1. Yes, its a fresh installation of windows on a new SSD.

2. All drivers are up to date. (at least as far as i can tell. I've manually updated all the drivers I can find)

3. Slow boot up is a combination. It used to boot in 3-5 seconds from pushing the on button to desktop, with a mere flash of the Aorus mobo screen. Now it takes up to 30 seconds with around 5-10 seconds of the Aorus screen, then another delay to desktop.

4. Nothing in file manager seems to be taking up an unusual amount of GPU.

5. I've stripped everything but the essentials from boot menu.

Finally, I've set all games to run at 1080p and even though the frame rate isn't exactly fantastic (50-60fps) its at least stable. Hopefully I'll have some good news to report in a week or two when the new card arrives.

In the mean time, I'd be curious if you remove the two most recent sticks of ram you bought and see if the boot-up time goes back to 5 seconds. I've had experience with that a few times: upgrading ram and it just completely making my computer run like shit and take five times longer to boot because of it not playing nice with a specific rig, or a mobo behaving incorrectly with 64gb, or it not liking XMP, or increasing the ram frequency beyond 2400Mhz making every other component fall well below par as well as audio failing. It can be a really annoying thing to troubleshoot memory. I've had ram pass memtest and ram benchmarks despite clearly being the culprit.

@mic_d: Have you set the XMP profiles for your RAM in the BIOS? I’ve had problems crop up before because I didn’t have the profile set so that the RAM had the right timings.

Also I can’t speak for Cad but as a user of photoshop and Lightroom I have gone over 16gb of ram usage before and sometimes games can use 10gb+ of ram so I think splurging on the RAM wasn’t exactly a bad choice.

Before you buy a $1200 GPU, I'd make sure to eliminate other possible problems first. A gtx1060 is about equivalent (a little better than) my R9 290x, and after upgrading my CPU last year, I was able to get 60fps in the majority of games at 1080p (sometimes needed to lower a few graphics settings, but not too much). If you have the money to spend, you can't do better than a 2080 ti, but a 2070 super or an RX 5700 XT (if you don't care about ray-tracing) would set you up for years of good 1440p gaming for around $700 less.

RAM can be tricky. A few weeks ago I ran the benchmark program from userbenchmark.com and realized that my RAM was performing really poorly. I hadn't enabled DOCP (my motherboard's equivalent of XMP) and I realized I had my RAM installed in the 1st 2 slots instead of the 2nd and 4th, which is recommended. Completely fixed my RAM problem that I wasn't even previously aware of. In your situation, did you simply add 32GB of RAM to 32GB you were already using? Are you sure the new RAM has the exact same specs as the old RAM? If not, that can cause issues. As someone already recommended, I'd try removing the new RAM and just running the old RAM to see if that fixes anything.

Anyway, if your PC is running worse than it was before the upgrades, something is wrong and a hugely better video card will only be compensating for the problem.

So after some more testing with RAM slots and overclocking etc. it turns out the likely culprit is CPU overheating. CPU goes to MAX temp within about 3 minutes of booting up and immediately starts throttling. Even with all fans set to 100% I can't seem to cool it. Going to install a new Corsair H150i and I'll chuck a new power supply in at the same time to rule out any issues there then hopefully it'll be ready for the next round of tests.

Boot up time has been reduced back to normal though which is something I guess.

@mic_d: Watch some videos on how to apply the thermal paste. It’s easy to get that part wrong. To me that’s the hardest part of building a PC.

@haneybd87: Fixed the thermal paste, although it was probably ok. The issue ended up being the water pump failed. The fans were all still operating fine but the heat wasn't being displaced correctly. Pulled out the water cooler and threw in a crappy little fan I had lying around and the thing instantly went back down to normal operating temps. Numbers went up!! 5ghz from the CPU and all cores operating as expected. No thermal throttling. Going to put a larger fan in tonight to ensure its stable for long periods under heavy loads.

Thanks again to everyone who commented on this thread. Even though it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out what seems like a simple issue, i think its pretty much solved now.

edit: Fitted the new cooling. PC is now a freaking rocket ship!!! Stable 5ghz, plays my games at 4k on ultra settings. No dropped frames. Bliss :)