PooPipeBoy

FX processors don't make any reasonable sense. Even a cheap Haswell Core i3 with an LGA 1150 motherboard can stomp all over those processors in core-for-core performance. I know this because I bought a Core i3 4130 and it's a suprisingly superior gaming CPU to my Xeon E5450 (which is pretty similar in performance to the Phenom II 955).

That would explain why the temps initially jump to 80C and then settle back down to 66C, for some reason I never knew the Turbo Boost was a temporary thing. I assumed it was the fan kicking in. Task Manager is saying 2.11GHz sustained while charging, which isn't too bad. Could definitely handle more speed though.

In Prime95 it averages 66C (with 25C ambient) in the maximum temperature test. Also did the OpenGL test in Cinebench R15 and got 82.77 fps, to give some idea of graphics performance.

Sure, I'll be testing temps. Been a while since I've done serious benchmarking. Is there another model that has MX150 graphics?

Long story short, I was out recently picking up a new laptop and stumbled upon the deal of the century. Ended up buying an Acer Aspire 5 A515-51G-50LA for AU$800, which seemed to have nice specs and sturdy build quality for the price. These are the specs: Core i5 8250U (Kaby Lake R with 4 cores 8 threads and 3.4GHz Turbo Boost), 8GB DDR4, Nvidia 940MX with 2GB VRAM, 128GB SSD + 1TB HDD. Being a Core i5 I knew it was a quad core, but it was only after I got home that I realised it also has Hyperthreading. So I decided to run Cinebench R15, and the one I picked up seems to have a particularly powerful processor: For reference, that's what you'd expect from a Core i5 4670K with a 4.2GHz overclock. And this is a 15W TDP mobile processor, in a machine with discrete graphics and an SSD for less than a grand in Australia (where computer gear is usually priced high).... Pretty incredible!

Yeah I reckon I'm gonna have to replace it, Asus hasn't responded yet and my supplier flat out won't replace it (which is fair enough...but still). Probably just gonna buy an El Cheapo thing for $80 and hope that it solves the issue. EDIT: Also tested with a different PSU and it didn't resolve the issue. So yeah, definitely a broken motherboard.

Aaaaand it died again. Seems to be doing this every 15 minutes now....

And just as I was sitting here now on my laptop, the system died again without warning....

Hey fellas, This issue popped up out of nowhere, posting this for second opinions to make sure I'm not the only one who thinks my Z87-C is dying. So I'm in the middle of a normal shutdown, because I hadn't shut down my system in a couple of days. Thought I'd go into the BIOS out of curiosity to see what voltage I was running, and as I was repeatedly hitting Delete to get in, the system completely dies. Uh oh. For the next half hour, the system was boot-looping like crazy and refused to POST. Then I noticed red LEDs would flash on the mobo during startup for the CPU, DRAM, VGA, BOOT DEVICE, literally everything. Double uh oh. So I did the usual troubleshooting: Cleared CMOS, disconnected everything, swapped RAM around, replugged power cables, etc etc.... For unknown reasons I was able to miraculously get a POST and got into Windows again, but now it seems the PCI-E x1 slots are completely dead. Not even my USB expansion card works. And all those red LEDs still flash when I boot the system up, even though the respective components are working fine. System specs: Core i5 4670K at 4GHz, Asus Z87-C, Corsair Vengeance Pro 16GB, Asus R9 270X, Samsung 850 Evo.

Yeah, sounds like something weird is going on. Are the motherboard drivers installed as well?

Keep an eye on the Task Manager process tab, you never know if a fresh Windows install is trying to download updates or running storage indexing (which particularly drains system resources).

Have you plugged in the 4-pin that delivers power to the CPU on the motherboard?

Running a GTX 650 1GB, awesome gaming graphics card provided that you don't play any games. An upgrade to new architecture and more VRAM is definitely needed.

With a computer like yours, those solutions would help, but it unfortunately doesn't fix the AMD graphics problem. Basically when you're playing Minecraft 1.6 or 1.7, the graphics card usage is only 20-30% with Max FPS and VSync disabled, when in actuality it should be at 90-100% usage. It's a weird OpenGL-related issue where the graphics card is stuck in a power-saving mode when it shouldn't be, which is why the in-game FPS is so terrible (my R9 270X gets 80-120fps when it should be more like 500fps) The same problem occurs with Space Engine, which is a 3D universe model program that also uses OpenGL, and again the graphics performance is really poor.

I've researched about it for hours because my R9 270X wasn't getting good FPS, but unless AMD releases an updated driver that throttles the graphics card when OpenGL games are running (because it's an OpenGL issue), then I don't think so. Other Minecraft players have had to go out and buy a new Nvidia graphics card to fix their problem, and one guy who got 120fps average with an R9 280 ended up getting a GTX 970 that got 1000fps no problems. I wish there were a proper fix, but it looks like there won't be, which sucks because my R9 270X is a good graphics card otherwise.