Performance Degrades Over Time

[Nepsotic]

I recently finished a new build containing a 4970k and dual GTX 970s in SLI. I haven't done much gaming until now but I've realised that after 2, maybe 3 hours of my system just being switched on, gaming performance degrades horribly, and before this occurs I can game at max settings perfectly. I'm talking horrendous stuttering and lag, and awful framerates. It feels like I'm gaming on my 6 year old laptop, and turning down graphics settings doesn't help.

 

I know this isn't a cooling issue, because not only is the CPU is watercooled and the build has great airflow, but all I have to do is restart for games to run well again.

I've mainly been playing RE: Revelations 2 which I know has optimization issues but to be honest, just about every game should run at +60FPS on max at 1080p with this build, so I'm worried that some of my parts are faulty.

 

If anyone has any ideas it would be greatly appreciated.

[Guest]

Still don't think you've ruled out thermals unless you actually use monitoring software. A restart is enough time for a CPU or GPU to cool.

[arronleeds]

nvidia drivers? i had this issue with one 970, battlefield 4 would start up fine, the next game the fps would drop  to 25 and stay that way until i  rebooted, it took me a full  os reset to get it working properly. it wasnt just bf4 too.

[shypin]

are you sure your are getting reasonable flow?

do you use a custom watercooling loop or AIO?

[APasz]

Sounds like a out of ram issue to me. It could be a million different things to be honest.

[KemoKa]

The only thing I can think of that causes those sorts of problems on that consistent a basis is overheating, especially because the same thing happens when you game at lower settings. Try changing the thermal paste, do whatever you can to make sure that your computer is actually running at decent temps. Computers can and do heat up gradually like this when they aren't cooled quite adequately and they will thermal throttle if they get too hot.

[LogicalDrm]

Could be also caching issue if you run games off HDD.

[Humbug]

Use GPU-z to plot thermal graphs in the background while you game. It will also monitor the core and memory clocks speeds. That way you can tell if any throttling happened and if it was related to the 970 temperatures.