Hey guys, I just put together a new PC and I'm having some trouble with it. I've tried out 3 different games on it so far and all of them seem to be suffering from some severe stuttering and low fps (Strangely, all games are hovering between 42-55 fps, never more, or less?). I'm using an i7 6700k (not overclocked), Asus GTX 1070, 16gb RAM DDR4-2400, and an EVGA 550w Gold PSU. Just to make sure I put the 1070 in one of my older builds and it seems to run just fine. I've built PCs before, but i'm far from a pro. I just can't seem to figure it out. I've considered it might be that my PSU is not powerful enough, but I have used a 550w PSU before in an older build. It used a i7 3770k and a gtx 970... never had a problem. From what I understand, the new 6th gen i7's and the 1070 are much better on power then previous generations. What do you think? Could it be the PSU? I'd appreciate any advice you guys can give me.

I don't know, check all the clock speeds to see if everything is running as it should, check your temps to make sure nothing is over heating and possibly throttling, and if all that checks out maybe try and overclock that cpu(that's what the K's are for anyway). Also what resolution are you running at? Also make sure all your divers etc are up to date, or even try and roll back to an earlier version as well to test.

Drivers up to date? What games and settings? 45-55 isn't exactly low.

Drivers are all up to date and temps look fine as well. Currently I've only tried running at 1080p. I also ran 3Dmark and the CPU/GPU seem to be clocking up as they should. The games I've tried so far are Doom, Total War Warhammer and Overwatch.

550w for a card like that seems tiny, but if it worked for a 970 and an i7 3770k, well, fuck. My gut still leans towards power. I'm kind of blown away it runs at all. I like to try and go big on a PSU than play the management game.

Other things that it might be are temps, I like to use the EVGA Precision X software to monitor that stuff myself but there are plenty of options.

Crucial used to have something on their site that would check your RAM for potential issues, but I can't seem to find it anymore. It did try to sell you new memory in the end, but it was helpful for diagnosing possible issues despite that.

I hate asking this, because it feels belittling, but you never know, is have you made sure all the drivers are up to date?

I've had this issue recently where I would launch a game that would normally run perfectly fine and it would experience severe stuttering with a low framerate. I checked active processes, cpu load, gpu load, fan speeds.. nothing. When I'd restart the PC everything would run smooth again. I've heard several other people online have a similar problem but never an actual solution.

FPS does seem low for 1080p.

Just to be sure, check the power connection to the video card.

Also with the RAM are you running XMP profile?

500w is the requirement so 550w should be fine, however i believe some of the third party ones with higher overclocks were pulling out more power than the official recommendation.

If it's heavily overclocked try and just run it at the default settings as well and see what happens, it should kill 1080p even with a bottleneck of some kind. I get well over 100fps in doom with my 980 at 1080p, and your card should be at least 50% faster. If you have your older psu and want to test if that's the issue, maybe throw that in there and see if the results are the same. It could also be something with hyperthreading, i'm not 100% familiar with that though. Make sure all your ram speeds are correct and it's reading all your sticks, i've had major issue with ram in my skylake motherboard.

I'm not running an XMP profile with the RAM currently. I have run a few RAM diagnostic programs and they turned up nothing. I even stress tested CPU and RAM with prime for just over an hour and encountered no problems.

Try running XMP profile to see if it helps.

When you installed the OS, did you do a complete clean install or copy over an image/ghost copy?

Have you tried completely uninstalling all previous nvidia drivers and clean installing the new ones? What temps exactly are you getting on your cpu and gpu?

Its not an power/PSU issue and you certainly have enough performance so overclocking or XMP profiles is not the solution.

Make sure you have all latest drivers installed. All the drivers for the motherboard (chipset) and graphicscard and whatever discs you are using etc. etc.

Might also wanna flash the Bios to the latest version if you cant get rid of problems.

Check what speeds your CPU and graphicscard are running at when you have problem. To me this sounds like an problem with the PC being in powersaving mode or something like that. Jeff had that problem amongst his billion other PC problems, its was some conflict with the VR headsets he used. Do you have any VR equipment or software running?

cpuid and gpuid are good programs to check the current speed of your GPU and CPU.

It probably isn't the power supply if yours is working normally (outputting up to near 500W, like it should be), despite what others are under the impression of, when nvidia recommends a 500w they account for the fact that people could be using lots of power for other devices and that power supplies often don't fully output what they're rated to - so unless it's dying, it should be fine wattage-wise. A 1070 only pulls around 225W (worst case), which leaves you plenty for all your other components, since they use MUCH less power than the GPU - unless you're running 10+ platter-based hard drives or something extreme.

Also, check your nvidia control panel settings - make sure power is set to "Prefer Maximum Performance" instead of "Adaptive" - unless you're really worried about a few cents worth of power each month, the Mx Perf setting avoid stability issues and maximizes performance - the stability issues caused by adaptive in many cases have made me decide that it's a setting I use, period. Also use "Single Display Performance mode" if you only have one display. Finally, as one of the last resorts, try finding the "real" nvidia clock speeds for your card model - since most come overclocked and often are not tested for stability in as many cases as they should be. Then use MSI Afterburner or similar to slightly move back the clock and memory clock back and test to see if the performance is due to mild clock instability. This is actually fairly common, I myself have had it happen on two different pre-OC'd nvidia cards, which then run fine at ever-so-slightly lower clocks.

Check Control Panel > Device Manager and make sure you don't have any "!" or "X" or "?" status for all your devices/drivers.

Try disabling any 3rd party AV you have and see if it helps. Most 3rd party AV products are useless junk that'll cause more problems than any viruses you might get that would've been prevented by the active protection (which is very few). Windows' built-in AV is among the best available for a consumer, performance and protection wise - because it's built into the OS and fully optimized, and have a HUGE userbase to go off of to fix issues or add new definitions.

If you didn't do a clean install of Windows 10 (you upgraded from 7 or 8, or you copied and moved the image from another machine), that often will help a fair amount, especially in overall stability but sometimes for performance as well.

That was a problem that only affected the new cards from AMD and not Nvidia as this thread is about. They didnt draw any more power than stated but they took more from the PCI express port than allowed by the standard and that was a problem for maybe 1% of the users at most. It has now been fixed and if you are running the latest drivers it should be a non issue.

That sounds like a graphics driver problem to me, especially if the card is working in another machine. Try doing a clean install.

If that doesn't work have you tried running FurMark to see what the clocks and temperature are doing under extreme stress? I know you said temperatures are fine during gameplay, but it never hurts to watch your clock speed as the temperature reaches it's maximum to see if/how much the card throttles.

Not really but if all the clocks are at their correct speed when you are experiencing the problems it might not be an powersaving fault. The powersaving modes are supposed to throttle up when you do demanding tasks so all modes should theoreticly be fine but i always put it in performance mode nontheless. Anyways try swapping them around and see if you experience any difference. At some point PC problems always turn into joyfull trial and error.

CPU running at 4Ghz is more than enough and it should be in turbomode when you play so thats ok, check the graphic card speeds aswell to see if something is throtteling down there for you.

The joys of PC gaming! Odd its happening on all the games. Sounds like there is a software/driver issue somewhere which can be hard to fix/pin down if simply installing the newest driver doesnt work. Could try an older driver as well. It shouldnt be the PSU. The GTX 1080 uses 180W, forget if the 1070 uses less so you have enough power. If it were just the one game id say that game just hates your hardware which happens. Batman AK ran for shit on my GTX 770, but that obviously was because it was rushed out the door and poorly coded. But other people did not have issues using a GTX 770 so something in my hardware didnt like their coding.

Once in a while you just get a game that has issues with your hardware when it shouldnt and there is prob not much you can do about it till the game is patched, but not three games with the same issue. There is clearly something up with a driver or setting somewhere. Be it on the GPU or motherboard. Could also check that all the cords to the motherboard are properly attached, make sure the GPU is all the way into the PCI slot. But thats pretty unlikely to be the problem.

Not, that's the new "adaptive" name. Set it to max, and also remember that every time you update your video driver, choose clean install and after installing it and rebooting, immediately go into NV Control Panel and change things back because the settings get wiped with the clean install, and still do sometimes even with the upgrade install. If you forget to do that with each driver update, you'll end up pulling your hair out trying to figure out what's wrong if you're like me!

I downloaded and installed all of the drivers listed for my motherboard on MSI's website, just flashed the bios to the newest version as well. The problem remains. I'm hoping it is just a driver problem, as you said, and that it gets fixed with later updates. Until then I'll just have to keep trying until I find a solution.

I'd take a look and see if your GPU or CPU is throttling.

Only time I had an issue similar to this was with an Nvidia card and a motherboard designed for ATI Crossfire.

I stuck the GPU in the second PCIE slot, not realising that it didn't run at the speeds of the first port. My FPS was down 15-20% across the board until I moved the GPU to the other PCIE slot.

Have you tried to check the install of the card? Make sure everything is snug and all the required 6/8pin power ports are secure? Does your motherboard have multiple Pcie slots? If so make sure it's in the fastest one as that could be bottlenecking your performance as well.

I haven't read all of the replies here, so forgive me, but did you check your CPU load to see if there isn't anything running in the background taking up resources? This was the problem I had for awhile. Make sure your cpu load is in the single digits (like 5%). This was my problem with Hitman, my cpu load when starting the game was already at 25%, so it ran poorly. There could be many things causing poor performance, tho.

This. What motherboard do you have? Have you tried installing the video card in a different PCIe slot? Are you sure it's in a 16x slot and not a 8x slot?

@rethla:

Please put your Windows in balanced mode. You can run benchmarks (like the one build in into CPU-Z), to confirm that performance mode does nothing/little to increase performance. It's just a giant waste of energy, because it disables core parking and voltage and frequency scaling as well as every single power saving technology, like keeping hard drives spinning infinitely. The only difference in theory is a tiny delay (in the 60 ms range) when you start up a very demanding app, however this delay has been further diminished with Skylake Speedshift. It's not a just a delay either it's just that at those 60 ms your CPU runs at quarter or so of the possible speed. Also a millisecond is 1/1000 of a second.

You save anywhere from 10 to a 100 bucks on electricity annually, and prolong the life and performance of every single component in your system.

Performance mode exists for trouble shooting and lazy admins, who just want stuff to work, even though someone else is eating the electricity bill. Power saving modes can be annoying at times when it comes to harddrives or monitors that shut off, they need a bit of tweaking.

@eurobum: Well i doubt it will save me even $10 but i might give it a shot, why not.

The simplest way to calculate savings is 1 Watt of power equals 1 dollar a year (if electricity is 11.2 $/kWh) for me it's more like 2 bucks for every Watt (here electricity costs more than 22.4 EUR/kWh). That is assuming 24/7 operation, if your PC is turned on 12hours a day on average then savings are just half.

Gaming PCs can idle anywhere from 20 to 100 Watts, and even more if you disable power savings

When I built my current PC 3 years ago now, everything game was running at half what I was expecting it to with the setup. Turned out the spinning hard drive was the actual bottleneck on performance because once I got one in it everything started performing at about double the speed