Computers; Where's my Choke?

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Spaloooooka

New member
Oct 5, 2010
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i7 3820
16gb of ram can be used.
dual amd 7990 [6gb of vram, 1ghz gpu]
250gb @ ssd 500gb/s + 2tb hdd @ 150gb/s

Tried all drivers, un-installed re-installed & up to date. All components from MSI.
Tried Cross-fire and single in each PCI-E 3.0 slots.

Cooling run at 70-85°C

Defragged, re-indexed.

No background programs. No Malware etc.

Less than a year old.

lots of games keep dipping below 30 frames.

Any ideas? D;
 

Morgoth780

New member
Aug 6, 2014
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So... you have two 7990's? If so, try just using one, frequently quad- and tri-fire give lower FPS than Crossfire.

Also perhaps try overclocking your i7.
 

Bravo Company

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Feb 21, 2010
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Since the 7990s are already two cards fused into one, that is probably where you're having problems, like the guy above said, try disabling one and see if that increases performance.

It is saddening that once you get into super high-end computer parts, most games don't utilize them correctly.
 

ohnoitsabear

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Feb 15, 2011
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I'm no expert on this stuff, so anything I say could be totally wrong, but I have a few questions that could narrow things down.

What specific games are you getting this problem on? This is probably the most important piece of information. Is it just brand new games, or are you experiencing slowdowns on games you previously got good performance on? If it's the latter, did you make any changes to your setup recently (upgrades, major updates, etc.).

What resolution are you running at? I'm guessing it's probably 1080p since that's what most monitors run at, but if it's higher your performance is going to start dropping fast.

If you're only experiencing this kind of performance on newer games, and you're not running on crazy resolutions, then I have a few ideas.

It's possible that some games simply have some performance bugs on your system, especially brand new ones. Look around and see if anybody else is having issues with the same games as you.

You might have some issues regarding using AMD cards. AMD cards traditionally aren't as well supported as NVidia cards, and it's possible some games aren't well optimized for them. Again, look into stuff for the specific game and see if anyone else is having the same issues as you.

Now, if there is one weak point of your system, it would probably be your processor. Now, don't go running out and buying a new chip just because I told you to, but it definitely is weaker than your GPUs, and that could easily create a bottleneck.

Honestly though, I think the real issue is simply we're in a state where things are advancing much more quickly than the past couple of years. Even absolutely insane machines aren't going to be able to max out everything that comes out in the next couple of years, not right away, at least. I think people just need to get used to the idea that they can't expect to max out everything on every game for the foreseeable future.
 

ResonanceSD

Elite Member
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Dec 14, 2009
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You're running Quad Crossfire without an -E series processor. Either invest $1000+ on your CPU, or sell one of your 7990s.
 

Morgoth780

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Aug 6, 2014
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ResonanceSD said:
You're running Quad Crossfire without an -E series processor. Either invest $1000+ on your CPU, or sell one of your 7990s.
i7 3820 is Sandy Bridge-e, but it's a quad core so to be honest isn't really worth it. If it really is a CPU bottleneck, the OP should probably just buy the i7 4930k which is the Ivy Bridge-e 6-core and costs ~$600.
 

Idsertian

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Apr 8, 2011
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Dropping in my two bits, but what thermal paste are you using? If it's just the stock stuff, you might try applying some better thermal paste to whatever component is registering at 70-85 degrees. I used to have a second-hand Radeon X1950 Pro that ran really hot with some fairly pants fps, until I realised that the previous owner sold it to me with perished thermal paste. Replaced it with Arctic Cooling MX-4 [http://www.arctic.ac/eu_en/mx-4.html] and boom, suddenly my load temps were lower than my previous idle temps and my fps noticeably went up.

Failing that, try making sure that your monitor's refresh rate isn't set to some stupid low value. If it's set down at 30 and you've got v-sync enabled, that'd do it. You could also try turning down/off anti-aliasing in game menus and forcing it through your graphics controller. I've found that, sometimes, doing that offers a performance boost over using in-game option, possibly because the card's protocols are better optimised than the game engine's code.

That's about as much expertise as I can offer, sadly.