FPS drops and VAR spikes in CSGO on brand new 5600X with an Asus Dual 3070

Mountie · January 26, 2021

TL:DR as soon as someone walks into my screen FPS drops from 400 to 30 and VAR spikes to 30+. It only happens in CSGO and any time I find a fix and reboot I get same issue ("fix" still in place).

Build: AMD Ryzen 5600X, Asus Dual GeForce RTX 3070, 16GB 3600MHZ RAM, MSI MPG X570 Gaming Plus Mobo.

I just built the PC yesterday, first time building one in 20 years. Everything works, it detects the 16GB RAM (2x8), works fine in all other games, but CS is a pain.

I had this issue the first time I loaded CSGO. A buddy suggested I check the power connections to GPU so I reseated the cables, rebooted the game, problem solved! Next day I play a game, everything is fine (400 fps at 1440p, 160 hz), no var issues (always <0.5 ms), and steam boots me for VAC files (there are no third party cheats or anything, I'm silver, what would be the point?). Mid game I verify files three times, reboot system a few times, eventually it tells me to patch a file in steam (not CS), which I do and it finally lets me reconnect mid game. Except now I'm back to the FPS drop and VAR spikes. On idle I'm at 400 fps, someone walks into view I drop back to 30 fps and VAR spikes to 30+ again.

I changed settings to force triple buffering which smoothed out the game at 160 fps, but I still have the issue of a game file isn't verified every time I load it. Last time I loaded it and it redownloaded which ever file isn't verified, it went straight back to the 30 fps issue. It seems like every time I find a solution and the game verifies itself, I get the issue again. I don't know what the file that is never verified is or how to stop it from happening but FPS aside that's also a real pain in the butt.

All BIOS and drivers are up to date. Reinstalling CSGO and steam as a whole didn't fix it.