Poor Performance in Games, Programs Load Slowly

[Crowes]

After a lot of messing with getting everything back to post, a fresh install of Windows 7, and even after upgrading to Windows 10, games still don't perform as well as they did before all the messing. I used to get decent framerates on plenty of games, and did quite well for only an R7 260X OC; compared to now where I get half of what It used to do.

 

The problem only seems to appear when I jump in games, but apart from that there's no conclusive evidence of one product being the issue.

 

• RAM may have underclocked during the process of moving it around in order to save itself from damage - Speed hasn't changed. 1600MHz.
• APU might be bottlenecking the GPU causing underperformance - I resolved this in the past by purchasing an AMD A10-6800K over the bottleneck which was an AMD A6-5400K.
• APU might be underpowered in terms of voltage - the BIOS reports the APU's voltage as 0.888 at idle. I didn't notice much of a change when under stress. Some research says that AMD's APUs are made to work at a lower voltage although that's only supposed to be at idle, not under stress.
• APU's 4-pin power cord may not be seated properly - pushed it in to double check it was seated correctly, it seemed so and no difference was made.
• APU's integrated graphics may be taking over the graphics card
• Benchmarking - benchmarks from Furmark initially crashed straight away, which Furmark's prompt said was either a faulty PSU or GPU. MSI Kombuster's used to report about 30FPS, and Just Cause 2's in built benchmarks report a solid 60FPS, yet Just Cause 2's multiplayer mod reports 45FPS in low-texture (less graphically intense) areas, and under 15FPS in extremely graphically intense areas; compared to the old 45-60FPS in all areas.
• Graphics card may be choked with dust - there isn't any visuably noticeable dust around the fans and there is only minor amounts in the heatink, it doesn't overheat and the heatsink isn't neccasarily choked.
• Graphics drivers may not be up to date - 15.7 Catalyst Drivers. ​​
• Memtest - Memtest reported absolutely zero problems with the system memory except in the very last test [Number 13/Hammer Test].
• Virus may be hogging resources and therefore slowing down the system - Malwarebytes only found some unwanted programs, no actual malware.
• Hard Drive might be too fragmented - completely formatting changed nothing.
• BIOS may require an update - updated through Windows 7 from 1.5 to 1.6 ​​
• BIOS may not have optimized defaults - loaded optimized defalts of the BIOS and nothing changed. ​

 

 

CPU: AMD A10-6800K Quad-Core @ 4.1GHz​

Motherboard: MSI A88X-G45

RAM: Corsair Value Select Single Channel DDR3 1600MHz

GPU: MSI R7 Radeon 260X OC

Case: Corsair Carbide 300R Windowless

Storage: Samsung 840 Evo 128GB Solid-State-Drive; Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200RPM Hard Disk Drive

PSU: BeQuiet! L8 PowerPlus 630W

Cooling: Cooler Master Seidon 120V (120mm) Water Cooler

Operating System: Windows 10 64-bit

​

[Bittenfleax]

-snip-

Have you done more SSD testing, like the health status. (I am not %100 but does the 840 Evo have software that tells you the health status?)

[Crowes]

Samsung 840 Evo SSDs have Samsung's Magician software. It reported that the SSD's health was "Good", having the following statistics:

 

 Sequential Read: 455MB/s

Sequential Write: 501MB/s

Random Read: 32476IOPS

Random Write: 27969IOPS

 

I also used it to test the HDD, of which isn't currently in use, but came up with the following:

 

Sequential Read: 134Mb/s

Sequential Write: 133MB/s

Random Read: 420IOPS

Random Write: 226IOPS

 

It's also worth noting that I used the "Performance Optimization" tool. Made no difference.

[Crowes]

My motherboard's "slow mode" switch must have been knocked somewhere along the line and was turning my Core Clock to 2GHz, then probably bottlenecking the GPU.Sorted.