Sudden low fps after ram upgrade

[xandao]

Hello. I bought a new stick of ram(Fury Beast 8gb 2666mhz) a few days ago, to add to my current one(Hyperx Fury 8gb 2400mhz). It gave me no errors and is running in dual channel at 2400mhz.

But ever since, I've been having low fps in open world games. Not at all of them, but most. The curious thing is that I had this same problem a few weeks ago (before buying the ram), for a day, but it fixed itself in the next day.

Temperatures are fine, nothing seems to be downclocking. Actually, the GPU is unsually cool, which could be hinting at the issue. At least in certain games, the fps drops lower the higher the CPU usage gets.

Things I've already tried:

removing the new stick and running it with the old one, only;

reseating both sticks;

clean windows installation.

pc specs:

CPU: I5 9400F

RAM: 2x8gb running at 2400mhz

GPU: ASUS PHOENIX gtx 1660

motherboard: Gigabyte H310M M2

PSU: THERMALTAKE 500W

I've attached a couple in-game screenshots with the Afterburner overlay on display.

 

[pendragon1]

did you run memtest or something to ensure they are actually playing nice together?

 

[xandao]

did you run memtest or something to ensure they are actually playing nice together?

I ran the windows memory diagnostic, since it's a quick test. It found no errors. Didn't make much sense to me to run memtest when even after removing the ram, the problem still persists. You think I should run it anyway?

 

[pendragon1]

I ran the windows memory diagnostic, since it's a quick test. It found no errors. Didn't make much sense to me to run memtest when even after removing the ram, the problem still persists. You think I should run it anyway?

it do it with both? then id start with clearing the bios and using the original stick. see if you can get it back to normal.

 

[xandao]

it do it with both? then id start with clearing the bios and using the original stick. see if you can get it back to normal.

How would I go about clearing the BIOS? Should I just open the bios menu and select Reset to factory or something like that?

 

[pendragon1]

How would I go about clearing the BIOS? Should I just open the bios menu and select Reset to factory or something like that?

yup. on the exit page there is usually a reset option. if it doesnt help, yank the battery and power cord, hit the power button to drain any residual charge, wait a couple minutes and put it back together.

 

[xandao]

yup. on the exit page there is usually a reset option. if it doesnt help, yank the battery and power cord, hit the power button to drain any residual charge, wait a couple minutes and put it back together.

Okay, the reset in the bios menu didn't work and from what I understand, my motherboard's battery is located right below the GPU, so I'd have to remove it in order to remove the battery and to be honest, I don't feel very comfortable doing that.

I forgot to mention though that about 2 months ago I was having an issue where the pc was rebooting/completely freezing up when running demanding games. So I took it to a shop for inspection and they cleaned the pc and reinstalled windows + ran Fumark on it for hours. The guy said the GPU reached around 90°c and didn't even shutdown. It came back working fine ever since. And now I'm having this issue after installing the memory, which happens under similar circumstances(running demanding games). So, I'm not sure if there's some underlying issue with the pc and now it's behaving differently than months ago. I just don't know how installing a new stick could have triggered this old issue, assuming it's the same thing.

 

[pendragon1]

Okay, the reset in the bios menu didn't work and from what I understand, my motherboard's battery is located right below the GPU, so I'd have to remove it in order to remove the battery and to be honest, I don't feel very comfortable doing that.

I forgot to mention though that about 2 months ago I was having an issue where the pc was rebooting/completely freezing up when running demanding games. So I took it to a shop for inspection and they cleaned the pc and reinstalled windows + ran Fumark on it for hours. The guy said the GPU reached around 90°c and didn't even shutdown. It came back working fine ever since. And now I'm having this issue after installing the memory, which happens under similar circumstances(running demanding games). So, I'm not sure if there's some underlying issue with the pc and now it's behaving differently than months ago. I just don't know how installing a new stick could have triggered this old issue, assuming it's the same thing.

temps looks fine, dont think thats an issue. tested your drives lately?

yup, its trapped. could unplug and try shorting this jumper ^^ for a minute or so.

 

[robijito123]

You could have a single rank and dual rank mem sticks, usually best to match memory. But it sound like a power setting issue if it happens under load, have you checked windows power settings or bios to like force turbo or something. That or drivers. Have you looked at l an app like gpuz or cpuz, or hwid to see what's happening?

 

[xandao]

Update: I set the windows power plan to maximum performance and the nvidia control panel energy management to maximum perfomance as well. Then I launched a game and everything is normal. But I'm not convinced that that was what fixed the problem, since I had already done that a couple times before. I think it just fixed itself, like it did weeks ago. If that's the case, the issue could arise again in the future. But either way, it seems to be power related.

 

[zandor]

Those screen captures look a bit odd to me. Usually when running a game the load varies more across CPU cores. Games tend to have a small number of "hot" threads and others that are not so intensive. Usually when I run a game with task manager open on a side screen I'll end up with some really busy threads and others that are doing something but not nearly so as heavily loaded as the "hot" threads. I'm also a little baffled as to why all 6 cores are running at 3.9GHz while power consumption is just over 30W. Unless you've overclocked it 3.9 means all 6 cores are running at around max all-core turbo boost. It makes me wonder if Afterburner is just reporting the highest CPU clock. Seems like some machines report that in task manager and other just report how fast a random core is running. As best I can tell my i7-8565U laptop reports the fastest speed in task manager while my i9-10980XE box seems to pick a core randomly. Unless the CPU is totally loaded up and loaded up evenly usually you see different cores running at different speeds.

So I'm kind of wondering if that CPU clock speed and/or power consumption reported in Afterburner are wrong. All cores at or close to max all core turbo for that chip and only using ~31W? Doesn't smell right.

How are ambient temps? This is a total shot in the dark, but that board doesn't have VRM heatsinks, and I'm kind of wondering if maybe the reason that neither the CPU or GPU are close to 100% is a mix of inaccurate reporting and power getting throttled down to ~30W due to overheating VRMs. I have no idea what monitoring apps report when VRMs are going critical. Just never been to that place.

 

[xandao]

Those screen captures look a bit odd to me. Usually when running a game the load varies more across CPU cores. Games tend to have a small number of "hot" threads and others that are not so intensive. Usually when I run a game with task manager open on a side screen I'll end up with some really busy threads and others that are doing something but not nearly so as heavily loaded as the "hot" threads. I'm also a little baffled as to why all 6 cores are running at 3.9GHz while power consumption is just over 30W. Unless you've overclocked it 3.9 means all 6 cores are running at around max all-core turbo boost. It makes me wonder if Afterburner is just reporting the highest CPU clock. Seems like some machines report that in task manager and other just report how fast a random core is running. As best I can tell my i7-8565U laptop reports the fastest speed in task manager while my i9-10980XE box seems to pick a core randomly. Unless the CPU is totally loaded up and loaded up evenly usually you see different cores running at different speeds.

So I'm kind of wondering if that CPU clock speed and/or power consumption reported in Afterburner are wrong. All cores at or close to max all core turbo for that chip and only using ~31W? Doesn't smell right.

How are ambient temps? This is a total shot in the dark, but that board doesn't have VRM heatsinks, and I'm kind of wondering if maybe the reason that neither the CPU or GPU are close to 100% is a mix of inaccurate reporting and power getting throttled down to ~30W due to overheating VRMs. I have no idea what monitoring apps report when VRMs are going critical. Just never been to that place.

Those screen captures look a bit odd to me. Usually when running a game the load varies more across CPU cores. Games tend to have a small number of "hot" threads and others that are not so intensive. Usually when I run a game with task manager open on a side screen I'll end up with some really busy threads and others that are doing something but not nearly so as heavily loaded as the "hot" threads. I'm also a little baffled as to why all 6 cores are running at 3.9GHz while power consumption is just over 30W. Unless you've overclocked it 3.9 means all 6 cores are running at around max all-core turbo boost. It makes me wonder if Afterburner is just reporting the highest CPU clock. Seems like some machines report that in task manager and other just report how fast a random core is running. As best I can tell my i7-8565U laptop reports the fastest speed in task manager while my i9-10980XE box seems to pick a core randomly. Unless the CPU is totally loaded up and loaded up evenly usually you see different cores running at different speeds.

So I'm kind of wondering if that CPU clock speed and/or power consumption reported in Afterburner are wrong. All cores at or close to max all core turbo for that chip and only using ~31W? Doesn't smell right.

How are ambient temps? This is a total shot in the dark, but that board doesn't have VRM heatsinks, and I'm kind of wondering if maybe the reason that neither the CPU or GPU are close to 100% is a mix of inaccurate reporting and power getting throttled down to ~30W due to overheating VRMs. I have no idea what monitoring apps report when VRMs are going critical. Just never been to that place.

It's summer in here right now, so the room where the computer is in is hot and the pc itself increases the room temp even more and I don't always have the AC on. The only thing I've noticed about the power consumption is that, whenever I'm having the issue, the GPU power consumption is lower than usual and so is the temperature.

The idea that Afterburner could be reporting wrong data makes sense, because there was a specific driver version that caused it to report wrong GPU temps. The real GPU temp would be at 65°c, but it would show 55°c on Afterburner, for instance. Updating drivers solved that. But at least the clock speeds match with the HWmonitor's readings.

But at least in the first two times I've had this low fps issue, it doesn't seem to matter whether I've just turned on the pc or if it's been on all day and I decided to play something. It just stays like that. And now, after 3 days without the issue, it came back tonight. I rebooted the pc and it went back to normal. But if it's an overheating issue, then I don't know how the pc was able to take on Fumark for 3 hours at 90c°(GPU) then.

I've taken some screenshots of HWmonitor, right after closing a game. I left it running while gaming, in case someone can make sense of the data. Note: this was after I rebooted the computer and it was running normally.