HUGE fps spikes on brand new computer when gaming.

[Gnastyinc]

I am running into a big issue and I cannot seem to fix it no matter what I do. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I built a new computer for my girlfriend and everything in it is brand new except for the graphics card. I gave her my old but fairly new 2080 when I upgraded to the 3080. She has had the computer for about 2 weeks and everything and every game has been running smoothly until very recently. We started playing Conan Exiles and at first the game ran perfectly and very smooth at about 50-80 fps for her on ultra. Fast forward 80 hours put into the game off and on and now we are facing a big problem, lag spikes. She will start playing and the game will be fine for a few hours but then she starts to get extreme lag spikes and stutters. She will go from 65ish fps down to 12 or 9 fps every few minutes for a second or two and once it starts stuttering like this it doesn't stop until she either restarts the computer (which sometimes doesn't fix the issue) or just stops playing for about 20-30 minutes and rinse and repeat. We have tried numerous things and nothing seems to work. She was also getting BSOD's maybe once every two days but after turning off intel turbo boost that seems to have fixed that issue. The lag spikes still exist though. I am running out of things to try and nothing seems to fix it. I will list everything we have tried and I will put the specs of her pc below. Again any help is greatly appreciated.

PC Specs:

Mobo - ASRock Z390 STEEL LEGEND LGA 1151

CPU - i7 9700F

CPU Cooler - CoolerMaster MasterLiquid ML240L RGB V2

GPU - Gigabyte Geforce RTX 2080 Gaming OC

Ram - TEAMGROUP T-Force Vulcan Z DDR4 32GB Kit (2 x 16GB) 3200MHz

PSU - Phanteks AMP Series 650W 80PLUS Gold

Monitor - ASUS VG278QR 27" Full HD 1920 x 1080 165Hz 0.5ms

everything is stock nothing is overclocked except for the ram since I had to enable XMP to get the ram to run at 3200MHz instead of 2133.

Things we have troubleshooted so far:

-Uninstalled and cleaned gpu drivers with DDU and reinstalled the latest set of drivers.

-She had NZXT CAM installed, we uninstalled that.

-Disabled windows defender.

-Turned off intel turbo boost.

-Made sure the cpu was using the max amount of power it can be in the windows power settings.

-When the game starts stuttering we closed it and instantly tried other games to see if those games would return the same results but they didn't, they ran smoothly as normal.

-Turned off Gsync.

-Lowered the in game settings to medium from ultra but the problem persists.

-Reinstalled the game.

-Monitored the CPU and GPU performance and temps, will list results below.

-I noticed when she starts to stutter that the GPU performance dips down from around 40-50 percent usage to less than 10

 

These are the task manager graphs for her CPU:

This is what it looks like when the game is stuttering with intel turbo boost enabled (3 screenshots):

https://gyazo.com/afffd4dee0e7ced417dc5f6567944641?token=697fe37629ec5e3bec31551c83a7a6fc

https://gyazo.com/4a011fe4b21cb12521c2accdd09d9876

https://gyazo.com/ed0515db15aa74be1df4b64174e4538d

This is what it looks like when its stuttering with intel turbo boost disabled:

https://gyazo.com/ffff7ead30360e72c2e4d70d5e3f804e

This is what it looks like when the game is running smoothly with little to no fps drops at all:

https://gyazo.com/9f6626cbb6153e12c3dbf0ec8dd0b07b

 

This is her CPU temps when it's not stuttering and when it is stuttering, there is hardly any change what so ever:

https://gyazo.com/bfc751fe8a1e1a89a76d9a105c59bd74

Her GPU temps hover around 55-68 degrees celsius when gaming and 30-35 when idle.

We ran benchmarks via userbenchmark.com. we ran one while she was having stutters in game and we ran one when the game was closed and computer was idle. The results are below.

Benchmark results while the game is open and stuttering:

https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/35304973

Benchmark results while the game is closed and computer is mostly idle:

https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/35305095

 

I have exhausted everything I can think of myself but I'm sure I could be missing something. My first thought was that the cpu or gpu was overheating but the temps seem fine across the board. I have tried doing tons of research but everything we try seems to come up short. Anyone have any ideas or different tests we could possibly run to get to the bottom of this? Again any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time.

 

 

[Rooked]

Did you undervolt the CPU? CPU Z says your VID is 0.9498V which is pretty low. Also check your GPU for that. 

[Gnastyinc]

1 minute ago, Rooked said:

Did you undervolt the CPU? CPU Z says your VID is 0.9498V which is pretty low. Also check your GPU for that. 

No we didn't undervolt anything. what could cause it to be so low?

[Rooked]

Just now, Gnastyinc said:

No we didn't undervolt anything. what could cause it to be so low?

What is the core voltage in the BIOS?

[Rooked]

Also try monitoring the VID when you're playing the game you are stuttering on, let me know if it is low when stuttering.

[Gnastyinc]

26 minutes ago, Rooked said:

What is the core voltage in the BIOS?

 

23 minutes ago, Rooked said:

Also try monitoring the VID when you're playing the game you are stuttering on, let me know if it is low when stuttering.

alrighty we are gonna check the bios right now. sorry for the late reply

[Gnastyinc]

33 minutes ago, Rooked said:

What is the core voltage in the BIOS?

it looks like its set to 0.928

[schwellmo92]

Have you tried resetting the BIOS to defaults?

[Chipetto]

I have had this happen to a friend before in the past.  This happened with a Windows update and it may have happened to you.  Try reinstalling the Physx Driver.  For some reason, it uninstalled Nvidias, and decided it wanted to reinstall Windows default video drivers for some odd reason.  When reinstalled, everything went back to normal. 

Don't complicate the problem more so than it is.  Start from the basics.  I did the same thing your doing now trying to help my friend fix it and it came to such a basic problem.

[Rooked]

4 hours ago, Gnastyinc said:

it looks like its set to 0.928

You can try putting it to 1.3V-1.35V or try reinstalling the Physx driver as stated above.

[Gnastyinc]

Thanks for the help and input everyone. We are gonna try these things and I'll report back.

[-rascal-]

15 hours ago, Rooked said:

You can try putting it to 1.3V-1.35V or try reinstalling the Physx driver as stated above.

 

That is just the monitoring tab.

Since it's idling in BIOS, the core voltage will be lower.

 

9 hours ago, Gnastyinc said:

Thanks for the help and input everyone. We are gonna try these things and I'll report back.

 

Disabling Turbo Boost...BSOD's...letting the CPU cool down for 20 ~ 30 minutes....

 

 

Go to (I think for AsRock) the OC Tweaker menu, and check what the Core Voltage is set to.

It is on [Auto] or the voltage is manually set, or using an offset?

 

Turn Turbo Boost back on.

Your Userbench score is "lower than expected" because the CPU is not boosting and only running at Base Clock 3.0 GHz.

Other user submissions have Turbo Boost enabled.

 

Instead, check to see if Multi-Core Enhancement (MCE) is enabled or disabled.

MCE violates Intel Turbo Boost specs...the motherboard is basically running the CPU on overdrive with MCE enabled.

 

I would monitor the temperature of the VRMs as well.

The AsRock Z390 Steel Legend uses a 3(x2) + 2 phase VRM, it's not great.

The heatsink over the VRMs is also not the best...and can run hot (e.g. 95*C+) when pushed with overclocking .... or if MCE is enabled with certain higher TDP CPUs.

 

If there is a temperature sensor over the VRMs, HWMonitor or HWInfo should be able to read it.

 

[Rooked]

5 minutes ago, -rascal- said:

 

That is just the monitoring tab.

Since it's idling in BIOS, the core voltage will be lower.

 

 

Disabling Turbo Boost...BSOD's...letting the CPU cool down for 20 ~ 30 minutes....

 

 

Go to (I think for AsRock) the OC Tweaker menu, and check what the Core Voltage is set to.

It is on [Auto] or the voltage is manually set, or using an offset?

 

Turn Turbo Boost back on.

Your Userbench score is "lower than expected" because the CPU is not boosting and only running at Base Clock 3.0 GHz.

Other user submissions have Turbo Boost enabled.

 

Instead, check to see if Multi-Core Enhancement (MCE) is enabled or disabled.

MCE violates Intel Turbo Boost specs...the motherboard is basically running the CPU on overdrive with MCE enabled.

 

I would monitor the temperature of the VRMs as well.

The AsRock Z390 Steel Legend uses a 3(x2) + 2 phase VRM, it's not great.

The heatsink over the VRMs is also not the best...and can run hot (e.g. 95*C+) when pushed with overclocking .... or if MCE is enabled with certain higher TDP CPUs.

 

If there is a temperature sensor over the VRMs, HWMonitor or HWInfo should be able to read it.

 

He said his GPU is 58 degrees when gaming and CPU is around 50-60 degress. Thought the CPU and GPU is not getting it's desired voltage.

[Gnastyinc]

The voltage was set to auto, We changed it to a fixed voltage of 1.3v and reinstalled physx and that has seemed to fix the issue but we will be testing it longer to see if it happens again.