I think something's up with my PC. Terrible graphics performance.

[chizow]

What are you comparing performance to? Were you seeing similarly poor performance with the older video card you just replaced? If so, then yes what you've posted, especially with results at low resolutions/low settings is a textbook case of CPU bottlenecking where a new video card isn't going to give you more FPS, it may just allow for higher AA or details/settings at the same unacceptably low FPS.

Here's a nice tool that shows how CPUs in that range are clearly the bottleneck in current titles to the point a faster CPU + slower GPU can actually result in higher FPS than a slower CPU + faster GPU. Your GPU is pretty close to a 4870 in this case, but you can see the extra 500MHz and larger L2 cache of the 6000+ results in a significant difference in performance over the 4800+.

Digit-Life CPU and GPU Comparison

Here's a bunch of results with various CPUs in newer games that also shows how much of an impact the CPU has in recent games with only a single fast GPU. Some of the games you listed are not only GPU intensive, but also incredibly CPU intensive, particularly Mass Effect.

GTA4 - 13 CPU round-up

COD4 + GRiD - Intel CPU Clock for Clock Comparison @ 2GHz

COD5 - 12 Intel and AMD CPUs

Far Cry 2 - various speeds

Left 4 Dead - various speeds

It looks like you ruled out PCIE bandwidth being the problem, and while its possible your PSU isn't up to the task, insufficient power will usually result in crashes or restarts rather than just poor performance. Unfortunately I don't think there's really a cheap fix to your problem, you can possibly start with the PSU but my guess is its time for a new platform+CPU to get the most out of that GTX 260.

 

[bamacre]

Originally posted by: InsiderGamer

Originally posted by: cusideabelincoln
Do a clean install of the drivers, or just reformat your computer. When your system is idling, what is it's CPU utilization?

The system has been reformatted already with the newest drivers for all components, including all BIOS updates.

CPU utilization when idle is 0-2%.

Including chipset drivers?

My money is on the PSU as well.

The GTX 260 uses a pretty good amount of power, needing two 6pin power connectors. Does that PSU have two 6pin's? Are you using an adapter? Just as a comparison, I've run the GTX 260 on a Dell 525W PSU and it has three 12V rails @ 18A. My personal XPS 410 has a 375W with two 12V @ 18A, running an 8800 GTS. So, your overall wattage is ok, but its weak on the 12V, where the video card is drawing power.

 

[Zap]

I think InsiderGamer needs to do some more research before throwing hardware/money at the problem.

A possibility is that the CPU is throttling due to heat or a screwy Cool & Quiet implementation. See if you can find some software that can monitor (with logging or a running graph) CPU temperatures and CPU speed. Core Temp maybe? Also keep tabs on CPU utilization. Even if it isn't throttling, if once your gaming starts the CPU pegs at 100% on both cores and never drops, then it might indicate that it is barely keeping up.

The GTX 260 can also throttle (down to 400MHz and finally 300MHz). It will throttle automatically under normal conditions if it detects that high 3D performance isn't needed. It may also throttle when running too hot, or when overclocked too much, or when receiving insufficient power (current or voltage). Run RivaTuner in the background to check for temperatures and core speeds.

You can also hook up a digital multimeter to your power supply to see if voltage sags during gaming. Someone I know had that problem - completely stable until gaming. Found out that under load the PSU voltage started dropping... ending up around 11v or less. The PSU apparently developed the problem over a few months of increasingly unstable gaming. Someone else I know had a PSU that deteriorated in the space of two days. These weren't crap units either.

 

[NoSoup4You]

I just upgraded last weekend from an AMD X2 4400+ (@ 2.42Ghz), 2GB DDR400 2-2-2-5, GTX260 to the rig in my sig. The good news is that the difference in performance is night and day. The E8400 has resulted in a monster improvement in performance, so much so that I'm still in disbelief. I never realized how much my X2 was bottlenecking my system until I finally ditched it.

But the bad news is that my AMD rig never ran as badly as you're saying yours is. I could run Crysis at 1600x1200 with a mix of medium/high settings. It would stutter along at times, especially later in the game, but I was willing to tolerate 22-35fps at mostly high settings (Shader, Texture...etc.). If you're not seeing that then it sounds like something other than the cpu is to blame.

My GTX260 is still quite new as well, I bought it in mid-December. My old card was an 8800GTS 640MB and even with that card I could run Crysis (with the AMD rig) way more smoothly than you're reporting with your GTX260. Shaders, Texture and Water on High, everything else medium would net roughly the same 22-35fps @1600x1200 with 8800GTS. This was running it in DX9 mode, DX10 kills performance for me. I don't have Mass Effect to compare.

I'd recommend grabbing an Intel setup and carry over the parts from the AMD rig. My upgrade only cost $300, and I sold my old AMD cpu, m/b, and RAM for $100 so it's only $200 out of pocket. Best $200 I ever spent on pc upgrades.

I don't think your PSU is to blame here either. My 600W Noisetaker was only rated at 18a per rail if I recall, and our rigs were basically identical so I can't imagine your psu is underpowered, unless it's just faulty.

On a final note, a friend of mine has an X2 3800+ (stock) with an A8N SLI motherboard. One of the chipset fans on the board is dying out and will stop running occasionally. He tells me he knows when the fan has stopped spinning because gaming slows down to a crawl. It's just a thought... He's purchasing a new Intel setup (same as mine but with an E5200 or E5300) sometime next month.

 

[InsiderGamer]

Zap, sadly you make a point.

I picked up the Corsair 550W PSU, with the 41A on the single 12V rail, and nothing changed. I do notice around 100% CPU utilization on both cores when Mass Effect is running (at modest medium settings at 1024x768) that does not go down.

As well, I ran CPU-Z while Mass Effect was running and VDDC Current (I think this is where it shows the number of Amps effectively flowing to the GPU) seems to middle around 20-30A, the highest amperage being ~31.8A. GPU clocks seem to be where they should be, they aren't throttling during the game.

I can't figure it out still.

 

[BFG10K]

I'll bet you've forgotten to install your chipset drivers.

 

[Martimus]

Originally posted by: BFG10K
I'll bet you've forgotten to install your chipset drivers.

Oh yeah! I forgot, if you don't install the AMD Dual Core optimizer and AMD Processor Driver a lot of recent games just grind to a halt at random times. You can get both here: AMD Processor Drvier Page.

I found this out after doing a format, and forgetting to install these two things afterward. A couple of my games would go from running perfectly fine to having horrible slideshows at random times. Installing these two drivers fixed that problem though.

 

[Peter Trend]

@InsiderGamer: are you runnning Vista? I was running Vista with only 2GB of RAM for a while (with otherwise same setup as my sig). And GTA-IV was completely unplayable even with all patches. Under task manager I found only 1.82GB were being utilised when I ran the game, but as soon as I put 8GB in, that utilisation leaped up to 3.85GB (with no other changes) and GTA-IV became fairly playable (I think the CPU is throttling it now, but 20 FPS is a lot better than 5 FPS!)

Sadly I don't think you can expect to play all the latest games at decent FPS with less than 4GB, on Vista I havent played Crysis yet, but I'm guessing it likes a lot of RAM too.


Unfortunately you're heading closer and closer to needing a whole new rig...good luck

 

[will889]

If it were me I would check the PCIe power connector (reconnect it) and reinstall all drivers, including the GPU - additionally the 260GTX needs at least an AM2 at around 2.8+ GHZ to get decent results (not too much excessive bottlenecking)

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: InsiderGamer
GPU clocks seem to be where they should be, they aren't throttling during the game.

How about CPU? Is the CPU throttling or going into low power (Cool & Quiet) mode?

Have you checked the RAM to make sure it isn't accidentally running slower than it should? These days with DDR2 and DDR3 hitting such high speeds, I wouldn't worry too much about it. However, if your DDR400 is running at 266 or something, then that's got to impact performance a bit. Are you running two sticks of 1GB or four sticks of 512MB? With four sticks I think it will automatically drop to DDR333, and the only way to bring up RAM speed would be to overclock your HTT.

How about clearing CMOS? Maybe sometime in the past you (or your friends as a joke) set CMOS to fail-safe mode? That might do all kinds of whacky stuff such as turning off L2 cache.

 

[InsiderGamer]

Originally posted by: Zap

Originally posted by: InsiderGamer
GPU clocks seem to be where they should be, they aren't throttling during the game.

How about CPU? Is the CPU throttling or going into low power (Cool & Quiet) mode?

Have you checked the RAM to make sure it isn't accidentally running slower than it should? These days with DDR2 and DDR3 hitting such high speeds, I wouldn't worry too much about it. However, if your DDR400 is running at 266 or something, then that's got to impact performance a bit. Are you running two sticks of 1GB or four sticks of 512MB? With four sticks I think it will automatically drop to DDR333, and the only way to bring up RAM speed would be to overclock your HTT.

How about clearing CMOS? Maybe sometime in the past you (or your friends as a joke) set CMOS to fail-safe mode? That might do all kinds of whacky stuff such as turning off L2 cache.

How can you tell the CPU is throttling and going into Cool and Quiet mode? I have turned CnQ off in the BIOS long ago (set to Disable) and in any benchmark/CPU info utility I have used, it's always been reading as 2.2 Ghz, and never lower.

I have 2 sticks of RAM, 1 GB each. As far as I know, no problems there.

As for the CMOS, I may have reset it as some point, but checking the BIOS settings, things like L2 Cache are enabled, and checking every setting (and it seems I'm almost well familiar with them by now), they don't seem to be out of order.

Gosh, with all this and replacing the PSU, I'm stumped. Really appreciate the help though, Zap. I'd appreciate any other additional thoughts you might have.

 

[neilganon]

I'm about as far from an expert as you can get, but you never actually said what motherboard you're using. Maybe that could help?

 

[bamacre]

InsiderGamer, can you just confirm that you did install the actual chipset drivers? I don't mean the AMD cpu drivers/optimizer. If so, did you install them first?

 

[InsiderGamer]

Originally posted by: bamacre
InsiderGamer, can you just confirm that you did install the actual chipset drivers? I don't mean the AMD cpu drivers/optimizer. If so, did you install them first?

Yes, chipset drivers have been installed.

The motherboard is an eVGA nForce 4 133-K8-NF41-AX, E 6.1.

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: InsiderGamer
How can you tell the CPU is throttling and going into Cool and Quiet mode? I have turned CnQ off in the BIOS long ago (set to Disable) and in any benchmark/CPU info utility I have used, it's always been reading as 2.2 Ghz, and never lower.

Well, if it always detects at full speed, then it isn't throttling. Do you have something that can monitor and log that data in the background while you game?

 

[Martimus]

Did you end up fixing your problem?

You have a better system than mine, yet I haven't had any of your problems, except for poor performance before I installed the AMD processor driver.

 

[InsiderGamer]

Originally posted by: Martimus
Did you end up fixing your problem?

You have a better system than mine, yet I haven't had any of your problems, except for poor performance before I installed the AMD processor driver.

Thanks for asking, but no, the problem persists. Processor drivers one of the first things I've installed everytime I've re-installed my OS. I'm just going to live with it for now, and perhaps reply back when I can figure out something.

Once again, I really do appreciate everyone's effort. Thank-you.

 

[techboie]

Trust me, the CPU or RAM is not the issue. Although you shouldn't be doing that well but you certainly shouldn't be doing that badly either. My A64 3200 @ 2.4GHz used to manage with Crysis at medium settings.

2GB is more than enough for anything except GTA IV.

Try to get a more power PSU if required.

Also, try playing games at ideal settings and benchmark and tell us the results. Maybe the FPS are actually okay. Do the crysis benchmark, GTA IV benchmark, etc.

 

[Fox5]

Check to make sure your graphics card is seated correctly. If it's seated incorrectly, you may be running at a lower pci-express speed. You should be able to check this with gpu-z or in nvidia's graphics control panel.

 

[spittledip]

I am running a 939 system, x2 4200 oc'ed to 3.6 gigs and a 2900 pro on XP with 3 gigs RAM. I can play TF2 andit runs smooth as butter. Fallout3 runs very smoothly as well- a couple hickups here and there, but those are to be expected with my system.
Your problem is your OS.. or to be more specific, some background running apps or something of the like. I am betting that your issue is software related.

edit: A clean install of Xp will probably fix you up nicely. When is the last time you formatted and reinstalled? Windows gets mucked up and a reinstall is a good ieda every 2 years or so. some people do it every year.