Limited performance with GTX 680 on boot, after restart performance is OK

[guinojona]

Hi Linus tech tips community,

I'm glad to be part of this community (Linus is very hot, just kidding I'm more into Slick) and I need a little guidance, don´t know if someone else has experienced this issue before. I just updated my mobo and CPU, I was using a i7 950 and a Gigabyte X58A UDR3 with my 680, since the launch of Watchdogs I noticed that my video card was limited by the CPU (I didn´t bother with overclocking, I had to reduce the electrical bill), so I decided to move to newer hardware, since I don´t really overclock due the high electrical bills on my country I went for the i7 4770 and an ASUS Z97-A. Finished installing the OS and I decided to boot some games to do benchmarks, oddly enough the games were running worse than ever, for example in Splinter Cell Blacklist I was hitting 40 FPS on Ultra and now I was getting 15 FPS, so I checked my mobo settings and I disabled the C States, verified that my PCI E slot was running at Gen 3 and such, once I booted back to Windows the performance went back to normal, tested Splinter Cell again and it worked at 44 FPS, so I thought the problem was the C States, so I decided to shutdown and go to sleep. The next day I launched Watch Dogs and I was getting 10 FPS on ultra, checked my bios settings again, after the restart the game went to 60 FPS while walking, so I turned off the PC and launched unigine and it was under performing again, I enabled MSI Afterburner and my clocks looked ok, GPU utilization was at 99%, clock was running at 1110 mhz the only thing that was not being used that high was the Framebuffer, it was sitting at 20%, I just restarted without entering the bios and bam it went back to normal, I ran again the Valley Benchmark while monitoring my framebuffer and now it was being used normally. So to sum things up, each time I turn on the PC I get very bad performance from the GPU, once I restart everything works as it should, after restarting my Valley scores went from 600 to 1767. I did a clean driver install using Display Driver Uninstaller and flashed my Bios and GPU to the latest firmware, I checked the Bus Interface on GPU Z, when I turn on the PC it says PCI-E 3.0 @ x 16 1.1, once I start running a 3D task it changes to PCI-E 3.0 @ x 16 3.0, while restarting it starts automatically at PCI-E 3.0 @ x 16 3.0 so don´t know if this is related to the framebuffer detail I saw.

My system specs are the following:

 

 

Platform:

Windows 8 (build 9200) 64bit

CPU model:

Intel® Core i7-4770 CPU @ 3.40GHz (3398MHz) x4

GPU model:

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 9.18.13.3788 (2048MB) x1

Ram:

16 GB DDR3 1333 mhz overclocked to 1600 mhz

 

Any idea what might be causing the issue? I really appreciate the time you spend reading my issue. 

 

[rheyL]

have you tried to check your HDD performance and health?

your HDD might be failing..

[WilliamDB]

In your BIOS try setting the PCIE slot into 3.0 at all times if that seems to be the issue.

 

have you tried to check your HDD performance and health?

your HDD might be failing..

 

 HDD failure will be noticed at all times not just in games, like your boot times will be minutes and your desktop will take forever to load even task manager.

[seiny]

Your pf pic is scary

[WilliamDB]

Also, try updating to Windows 8.1. I don't see as many issues with games and frame rates since updating from 8 to 8.1, even though the general gaming consensus is that 8.1 breaks games. If possible install Windows 7. I'm going back to Windows 7 soon because Windows 8 is just not very nice for overclocking except for its ability to repair itself when your overclock hoses your OS. Even though you won't be overclocking, most games and benchmarks aren't made to work with Windows 8 just yet, they're mainly made to be compatible with Windows 7.

[guinojona]

I tested with a GTX 560ti, the framebuffer usage stayed the same during cold boots on that card, I'm going to try a clean install, the card has been reseated again and I went back to an older firmware using nvflash, the HDD are ok and both pass the S.M.A.R.T check and other test using the WD check tool. Will test with the clean install and see what happens.

[guinojona]

No luck, the clean install didn´t solve the issue. I'm using the 337.88 drivers, will try with an older version.

[guinojona]

I moved my card to other PCI E slot, same story, the performance was bad on cold boot, I have come to the conclusion it hates my 680, I tested using a 560ti, it didn´t present any performance issue, it worked fine on all the PCI-E slots. Curious enough 680 works on other motherboards ok, spoke with ASUS, they  didn´t heard of this issue before so I'm out of options, I can´t return the mobo because if they test it with other GPU it will work so I guess I'm stuck doing reboots to get my performance to normal, hope they fix this in the next bios update. Thanks everyone.