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I own a reasonably high performance, although a bit outdated (4 years), computer and have been, for some time, experiencing bad performance and about 1 second freezes on all of the games I play. I also get these freezes, I think, while on bro

I tried a clean install of Windows 10, had Windows 8 before, but the problem remained. I then concluded that the problem should remain in hardware, probably graphics card or RAM, so I tested both my memory sticks but to no avail, I got no errors.

I wanted to know if there is a way I can make a detailed diagnosis of the problem, since what I learned from school is quite a bit outdated, and, since I have no spare hardware, my only solution, right now, is to buy a new graphics card and check if the problem is solved, although I'm quite worried that the problem is maybe in some other component and I'm "wasting" money.

To put it in a better perspective, I have freezes on all games and have to run them in Medium/Low in order to achieve 60FPS@1080p. Some of the games are: Rocket League, CS:GO, Dark Souls 1/2/3. Although I understand that some of the bad performance is due to my card being outdated, having bad performance on "old" games, is not really normal.

Graphics card temperatures don't exceed 70ºC.

My computer specs are the following:

  • CPU: Intel Core i5 3570K (3.4GHz, no OC)
  • GPU: MSI GTX680 2GB (no OC)
  • MB: ASUS P8Z68-V LX
  • RAM: 2x Corsair Vengeance 4GB DDR3 1600MHz CL9
  • SSD: CORSAIR SSD 120GB FORCE GT (OS)
  • HDD: WD Blue 160GB (Scratch Disk) + WD Green 1TB (Games)
  • PSU: XFX Pro 750W Core Edition
  • OS: Windows 10 Pro (I think)

Any help is welcomed.

André Dias
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1 Answers1

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If we are talking about an "older" PC, the first thing I would check is the temperatures. There is a feature called thermal throttling when your CPUs performance is lowered to sustain an ideal temperature.
Open resource monitor (start - run - resmon), in the CPU tab, you can see Maximum Frequency. Make sure is 100% even when the CPU is under pressure.

You can install Hard Disk Sentinel to check HDD/SSD.

You can check your GPU with a benchmark software. For example you can use FurMark, and check if the GPU usage works on 100%.

The RAM should be fine, else you would get BSODs or freezes. In case you want to make sure it works properly, there is a Windows tool that you can use to check it. Start - Run - mdsched.exe You need to run this as an administrator.
Also for best performance and stability you should enter BIOS and load XMP profiles.

Lrnd
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