Story of an odd CPU Issue

[sphbecker]

I had something odd happen over the weekend, which I was finally able to resolve, but it begs the question of if running motherboard software is a good idea or not.

 

I noticed that several games I play had a massive FPS drop, I typically get 100-144 fps on high at 1440p, all of a sudden I could barely maintain 30 FPS. Even dropping graphics settings down to Low / 720p didn't even help. I had made no recent changes so was pretty confused. I started investigating and noticed that all games were pushing my CPU to 100% while my GPU wasn't breaking a sweat. I both restarted and power cycled the computer, same issue.

 

As I dug deeper, I noticed that even at 100% CPU, the temperature was VERY low. I then noticed all cores were set to 2.2 GHz and the voltage was wrong too. Again, I had changed nothing. I opened the ASUS software (which lets just be honest, is crap) and it showed everything set correctly, but confirmed the wrong current speed. I used it to manually put the computer into Ecco mode, then moved it back to Performance. From the software's point of view, nothing had changed, but the issue went away. I suspect the software somehow applied its Ecco settings and thought it was in Performance mode (and I guess doesn't reapply at boot time).

 

That begs the question, why am I running this ASUS software? I generally feel like Windows does a good job of CPU power management and I don't typically trust hardware makers to make good software. I installed it thinking that ASUS is probably managing the motherboard in a way more granular that Windows is able to, which is probably true, but that clearly doesn't mean it is always doing good things. Maybe I should remove the ASUS software and just let firmware do its thing.

 

My setup (not that I am the kind of person to put this in my sig, but for this post, it is relevant.

Motherboard: ASUS PRIME X470-PRO

CPU:  2700X

GPU:  RTX 2070 Super