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New Leaf
Jul 24, 2013

Dragon Balls? Are they tasty?
Problem description: I'm having problems in multiple games and I'm not sure if the issues relate to each other at all. GTA V runs fine for the most part but has some pretty extreme frame rate drops sometimes. Fallout: New Vegas is giving me half second long freezes every handful of seconds, along with some random audio sync issues. I just got Shadow Warrior (2013) on a Humble Bundle sale and it's virtually unplayble- graphical lag every few seconds paired with audio looping where every 5th word loops several times and makes the game skip like a bad CD. Low impact games like This War Of Mine run perfectly fine. I didn't have any problems with Dragonball Xenoverse either.

This afternoon I had a weird issue- while attempting to find a fix, I installed a bunch of non-essential Windows updates hoping for a miracle and restarted my computer. Instead of restarting, it turned completely off. I hit the power button, it booted to the motherboard screen and turned off. I did this 3 more times before toggling the power supply off then on again and it booted like nothing had ever happened. It's been running like normal ever since. This is troubling, and I dropped the vendor a line but haven't heard back just yet.

Editing to add that I have no audio issues with video playback or music.

Attempted fixes: Checking that I have the most recent drivers, patches, looking for others having similar issues and seeing what they did.. no dice.

Recent changes: I've had this PC about a month and a half.. I've installed a bunch of poo poo.

--

Operating system: Windows 8.1, 64 bit

System specs: Assembled by CyberPowerPC- I'm pulling this straight from my invoice:

Processor: AMD FX-8320 3.50 GHz Eight-Core AM3+ CPU 8MB L2 Cache & Turbo Core Technology
Cooling: Asetek 550LC 120mm Liquid Cooling CPU Cooler
HD: 120GB SSD + 1TB HDD WD BlackČ Dual Drive SATA-III 6.0Gb/s - 350 MB/s Read & 140MB/s Write (Combo Drive)
RAM: 8GB (4GBx2) DDR3/1600MHz Dual Channel Memory
Motherboard: GIGABYTE 970A-DS3P AMD 970 ATX w/ Ultra Durable 4 Classic, On/Off Charge, GbLAN, 2 PCIe x16, 3 PCIe x1, 2 PCI
Power Supply: 600 Watts - Standard 80 Plus Certified Power Supply - SLI/CrossFireX Ready
Video Card: AMD Radeon R9 280 3GB GDDR5 PCIe 3.0 x16 Video Card (Single Card)

Location: USA

I have Googled and read the FAQ: As much as I can..

New Leaf fucked around with this message at 02:25 on May 28, 2015

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Mo_Steel
Mar 7, 2008

Let's Clock Into The Sunset Together

Fun Shoe
Download, extract and run the Standard Edition Portable w/o Ads (zip) of Crystal Disk Info on this page (the top-right link in the table under the "[2015/04/01] CrystalDiskInfo 6.3.2" heading) and post a picture of the results for each drive please.

I'd check your system drivers as well; audio and chipset drivers in addition to the normal video card drivers. You should be able to find chipset and audio drivers for your motherboard here.

Mo_Steel fucked around with this message at 05:47 on May 28, 2015

New Leaf
Jul 24, 2013

Dragon Balls? Are they tasty?
Hope this is right.



I'm going to start digging through drivers now.

Mo_Steel
Mar 7, 2008

Let's Clock Into The Sunset Together

Fun Shoe
Hopefully someone with more experience with hard drive failures can comment on the drive; it shows Good so it didn't hit any default thresholds for warnings, but it's also a somewhat weird drive setup (combination SSD and HDD?)

New Leaf
Jul 24, 2013

Dragon Balls? Are they tasty?
If you know of anyone, feel free to steer them this way. :)

Is there a possibility something could be wrong with a component? If it was, would I be seeing more issues than I am? I fired up some Xenoverse last night because it is the only thing I own that runs silky smooth right now. I may install some other games that I'm "done" with from my Steam library just to see how they react.

Edit: How much would adding RAM even do? I didn't skimp on this build, but it isn't a monster either- didn't want to spend more than a grand and I kept it closer to $900- but I was really hoping to get better performance out of it than I am. This is really bumming me out, I could fire up my old PC from 2011 and play something as old as New Vegas on lower graphics with no freezing. Even on lower than the Ultra setting it defaults me to I still get this audio/video weirdness. I didn't play much into Shadow of Mordor because that was the first game I bought where my old PC really started to show its age, but doing the built in benchmarking for that held it around 40-50 FPS but had a muti-second spike in the middle where even the benchmarking froze for a few seconds.

New Leaf fucked around with this message at 14:42 on May 29, 2015

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice
Your actual issues are caused by your motherboard. Your computer has a $55 motherboard, which is too cheap to possibly work. It really is pointless to put any time or effort into troubleshooting before replacing with a motherboard that is capable of operating the system. For reference it costs about $200 to build a really good quality motherboard, $150 is about what a decent motherboard costs, and $100 is the minimum cost for a functional motherboard. $55 is right-out, and you'll note most of the comments on Newegg are by people who realize it doesn't work.

I hate to be a dick, but you really made some poor decisions with the component selection on this build that will prevent you from having a good experience. AMD FX-series CPUs are roughly equivalent in gaming performance to Intel CPUs from five years ago. This isn't hyperbole or me being an Intel fanboy, AMD CPUs really are that slow now. When you combine that with the small system SSD and slow hybrid HDD, your new system really isn't a substantial upgrade over your old one. Checking out the Parts Picking Megathread before buying would have let you put together a system that actually met your needs and expectations and was built using decent quality components for reasonable reliability.

As for what to do right now, replace the motherboard with a good quality Asus board and overclock the CPU, you can hopefully pull 10%+ out of it. Since the CPU is the largest bottleneck for the system that will make the biggest impact to helping performance. You don't specify what SSD you have, if it's an OCZ or Crucial model replace ASAP with a Samsung of acceptable size. I don't think more RAM would really help. If possible see if you can flip the system on Craigslist or something once you have it stabilized and upgrade to something more in line with your needs, which would be an Intel Core i5 CPU.

New Leaf
Jul 24, 2013

Dragon Balls? Are they tasty?
Yikes.. I'm in too deep to do anything like that right now. I might be able to pull a new board, but flipping it.. I'm not really game for that. I tried to spot-check reviews, but I don't really know what I'm doing with a lot of this, so a lot of folks tend to talk over me in threads like that. Do you have a suggestion of a board that would work with the components I have available? Something like this maybe? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813132118

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice
What's the brand and model of the power supply in the system? You can confirm this by pulling the side panel off and looking at the label. This will determine if that also needs to be replaced. Unfortunately a big problem with low-end system builders like CyberPowerPC is that every component that doesn't have a brand and model specified uses low-quality off-brand parts.

That board you linked is for Intel CPUs, here's an Asus M5A99FX PRO R2.0 for $118 - $15 MIR. That's a pretty decent board, I don't think there's really much point in paying more for a system like yours. It should allow you to make the most of your CPU as well. The biggest difference is a total of 8 VRM phases versus 5 on the Gigabyte board, and Gigabyte boards are notorious for using lower quality power delivery components that negatively impact stability. Spreading the load over 8 phases improves the stability and "cleanliness" of the power to the CPU, especially under heavy load, and reduces how hot the components in each phase get, improving efficiency and lifespan.

Alereon fucked around with this message at 00:29 on May 30, 2015

New Leaf
Jul 24, 2013

Dragon Balls? Are they tasty?

Alereon posted:

What's the brand and model of the power supply in the system? You can confirm this by pulling the side panel off and looking at the label. This will determine if that also needs to be replaced. Unfortunately a big problem with low-end system builders like CyberPowerPC is that every component that doesn't have a brand and model specified uses low-quality off-brand parts.

That board you linked is for Intel CPUs, here's an Asus M5A99FX PRO R2.0 for $118 - $15 MIR. That's a pretty decent board, I don't think there's really much point in paying more for a system like yours. It should allow you to make the most of your CPU as well. The biggest difference is a total of 8 VRM phases versus 5 on the Gigabyte board, and Gigabyte boards are notorious for using lower quality power delivery components that negatively impact stability. Spreading the load over 8 phases improves the stability and "cleanliness" of the power to the CPU, especially under heavy load, and reduces how hot the components in each phase get, improving efficiency and lifespan.

Thoughts on this one? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130754

That's the one my buddy came up with when I told him what you pointed out.

grack
Jan 10, 2012

COACH TOTORO SAY REFEREE CAN BANISH WHISTLE TO LAND OF WIND AND GHOSTS!

New Leaf posted:

Thoughts on this one? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130754

That's the one my buddy came up with when I told him what you pointed out.

That motherboard does not have the correct socket for your CPU. You need something with an AM3+ socket, not FM2.

Look for a motherboard from Asus or Asrock that uses the 970, 990X or 990FX chipset.

Good, quick choices would be the Asus M5A99FX Pro that Alereon mentioned, or the Asus M5A99X EVO.

New Leaf
Jul 24, 2013

Dragon Balls? Are they tasty?

grack posted:

That motherboard does not have the correct socket for your CPU. You need something with an AM3+ socket, not FM2.

Look for a motherboard from Asus or Asrock that uses the 970, 990X or 990FX chipset.

Good, quick choices would be the Asus M5A99FX Pro that Alereon mentioned, or the Asus M5A99X EVO.

Christ, computers are hard.. And that was from the guy who was going to help me fix everything. I'm doomed.

I've ordered the suggested board. Thanks folks. I'll come here before I try to build my next computer. Hopefully this won't turn out to be a total disaster and can hold me over for a few years. I just want single player games to look decent and smooth, I'm not playing anything twitchy online or working with Oculus Rift or anything.

New Leaf fucked around with this message at 11:50 on May 30, 2015

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice
Once you get the new board and the stability problems are corrected, do some research on how to overclock your CPU. You should be able to push it to 4Ghz or so, which will help the bottleneck for gaming performance. Make sure you take the free upgrade to Windows 10 when it comes out, it's time limited so you have to take advantage of it in the first 6 months as I recall, and the upgrade to DirectX12 will provide tremendous gains on systems with slower CPUs. Note that I do still recommend checking your power supply, as if it's a generic model you'll likely need to replace it as well for stable operation.

Here's a bit more factual information on why AMD CPU suck at gaming so you don't just have to take my word for it: Here's a gaming review of the AMD FX-8350 4Ghz CPU, which is roughly what you're hoping to be able to overclock your FX-8320 3.5Ghz to. Average FPS is pretty common and self-explanatory, the most interesting chart is the "Time Spent below 16.7ms", which measures how much time is spent below the target framerate (60fps=16ms, 30fps=32ms, etc). Since you don't care about framerates above the target, this is a much better measure of the quality of the gaming experience than average framerate. As you look at this game and the others in the review, the AMD CPUs are consistently at the bottom, providing worse performance than the Intel Core 2000-series from 2011. This review doesn't even include Intel's 4000 and current 5000-series CPUs. Unfortunately using an AMD CPU really is like stepping back in time to the performance of 5 years ago.

Despite being awful gaming CPUs, the AMD FX-series doesn't do too badly on other benchmarks. This is because Intel CPUs are designed with four very fast cores, while AMD CPUs are designed with eight very slow cores. Apps that can use all the cores and get their combined performance work really well on AMD FX-series CPUs, often providing a better value than Intel CPUs. However, games typically use a smaller number of cores, up to four, and need those cores to be as fast as possible. This puts AMD CPUs at an extreme disadvantage for gaming. The upcoming DirectX12 API in Windows 10 focuses on improving CPU scaling and spreading work across more cores, so that should help a lot, nearly doubling framerates and helping narrow the gap with Intel CPUs (though they will also see significant gains). It will take some time for drivers for older cards to be fully functional, however.

New Leaf
Jul 24, 2013

Dragon Balls? Are they tasty?

Alereon posted:

Once you get the new board and the stability problems are corrected, do some research on how to overclock your CPU. You should be able to push it to 4Ghz or so, which will help the bottleneck for gaming performance. Make sure you take the free upgrade to Windows 10 when it comes out, it's time limited so you have to take advantage of it in the first 6 months as I recall, and the upgrade to DirectX12 will provide tremendous gains on systems with slower CPUs. Note that I do still recommend checking your power supply, as if it's a generic model you'll likely need to replace it as well for stable operation.

Here's a bit more factual information on why AMD CPU suck at gaming so you don't just have to take my word for it: Here's a gaming review of the AMD FX-8350 4Ghz CPU, which is roughly what you're hoping to be able to overclock your FX-8320 3.5Ghz to. Average FPS is pretty common and self-explanatory, the most interesting chart is the "Time Spent below 16.7ms", which measures how much time is spent below the target framerate (60fps=16ms, 30fps=32ms, etc). Since you don't care about framerates above the target, this is a much better measure of the quality of the gaming experience than average framerate. As you look at this game and the others in the review, the AMD CPUs are consistently at the bottom, providing worse performance than the Intel Core 2000-series from 2011. This review doesn't even include Intel's 4000 and current 5000-series CPUs. Unfortunately using an AMD CPU really is like stepping back in time to the performance of 5 years ago.

Despite being awful gaming CPUs, the AMD FX-series doesn't do too badly on other benchmarks. This is because Intel CPUs are designed with four very fast cores, while AMD CPUs are designed with eight very slow cores. Apps that can use all the cores and get their combined performance work really well on AMD FX-series CPUs, often providing a better value than Intel CPUs. However, games typically use a smaller number of cores, up to four, and need those cores to be as fast as possible. This puts AMD CPUs at an extreme disadvantage for gaming. The upcoming DirectX12 API in Windows 10 focuses on improving CPU scaling and spreading work across more cores, so that should help a lot, nearly doubling framerates and helping narrow the gap with Intel CPUs (though they will also see significant gains). It will take some time for drivers for older cards to be fully functional, however.

Thanks, this is great info. I'll study it during my next downtime at work. I've been a PC gamer for ages, but I've never been super knowledgeable about what's what. I gave up around 2002. Early on I tended to just slap a new video card in an old Dell machine and call it a day, but this is the first time a machine from CyberPower has disappointed me. I'm well aware I could probably do it cheaper on my own, but the liability for breaking a part being on them rather than me is comforting. I usually just drop a few hundred bucks on something I've fiddled with on their site and use it for a few years.

In installing the processor in the new motherboard, am I going to have to source some thermal paste stuff? If so, recommendations? Or can I just pop it in as-is? My at-work IT folks are both PC gamers who build their own (wish I'd known them as well as I do now before I started on this venture :argh: ) and they're going to help me do the rebuild at the office next week. I just doubt that they'll have any thermal paste on hand if we need it.

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice
You can pick up thermal paste at any store that sells computer parts, I'd recommend against anything fancy like Arctic Silver as they can be electrically conductive and difficult to apply, a basic tube or packet of white thermal paste should be $1. Exactly how to apply it is almost a religious argument, you can find guides online, but in any case you want to clean both the CPU and heatsink with rubbing alcohol or lighter fluid or something, apply the thermal paste to the CPU heat spreader (not too much!), then carefully secure the heatsink.

There's basically two camps on applying thermal paste: people who spread it over the surface of the CPU heat spreader, and people who apply a dot or line of thermal paste and let the mounting pressure of the heatsink squish it out. Spreading takes a bit longer and is easier to mess up if you twist or slide the heatsink around on the CPU surface during installation, but guarantees perfect coverage of the heat spreader. The line or dot method is quicker and harder to mess up during installation, but coverage may not be as good depending on the shape of the bottom of the heatsink. Personally I spread, but if you use a normal heatsink with a flat base the dot or line method should work well enough. For "direct-touch" heatsinks with the copper heat-pipes on the bottom touching the CPU (see example here), if you use a line it must be crossing the heat pipes or the paste will not spread.

Alereon fucked around with this message at 16:48 on May 30, 2015

New Leaf
Jul 24, 2013

Dragon Balls? Are they tasty?
The only parts store in the area has closed down. There were signs on the door directing me to some laptop store that only had Arctic Silver for $11, so gently caress that. The dude who is going to help me out had me get some Cooler Master stuff for $5 on Amazon.

I'm not expecting too many miracles, but after this is all said and done (which we're hoping to work on it tomorrow afternoon), what's the ideal outcome? Will this fix most of my frame rate hangups and audio glitches? What was the real problem- just the original motherboard's innate shittiness keeping the components from talking to each other efficiently?

New Leaf
Jul 24, 2013

Dragon Balls? Are they tasty?
New motherboard in place and...

*drumroll*

No change. At all. I just blew over $100 and everything still has the exact same issues.

So now that it's not my motherboard, what's the problem? I don't give a poo poo what benchmarks say about AMD vs Intel, this machine should be able to run a 5 year old PC game.

Edit: Sorry I'm a bit on edge, this is really frustrating the gently caress out of me.

New Leaf fucked around with this message at 00:34 on Jun 5, 2015

Mo_Steel
Mar 7, 2008

Let's Clock Into The Sunset Together

Fun Shoe
Got a spare PSU to try out? That'd be my next line of thinking if it keeps shutting down during the startup phase and it's not the motherboard or HDD. Or is it running now but just poor performance? In all games or certain ones, immediately or after a certain time frame or at random?

New Leaf
Jul 24, 2013

Dragon Balls? Are they tasty?
Some games it's fine.. others it's garbage. I booted up GTA5 last night after my rant and it was flawless. I was amazed since I'm getting such poor performance in old poo poo like New Vegas and Shadow Warrior. I'm really confused by the whole thing. New Vegas is modded with the stuff that's supposed to fix the problems before anyone asks. It looks/plays fine while just meandering around, but the second I hit combat I'm losing whole chunks of visuals. Gun audio is off- see the animation before I hear the sound- and iron sights is impossible. It'll freeze the screen, then a couple seconds will go by and everyone is in a different place. Shadow Warrior is even worse- totally unplayable. Constant audio lag, the same choppy visuals as New Vegas. If I had any real issues it would come out during GTA I'm sure. I don't know what to make of it.

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New Leaf
Jul 24, 2013

Dragon Balls? Are they tasty?
I don't have a lot of high graphics games, and I really don't want to invest in any if this is going to continue to give me problems. If I can't run Fallout 4 whenever it launches, I'm probably going to smash this thing with a golf club. I really built this to be able to play GTA5 when my old PC couldn't handle it. I re-installed Deus Ex: HR because I couldn't think of anything else pretty and taxing, and it runs just fine with a few hitches here and there, but I am still having some audio/video sync issues. Where is that controlled from? Is that coming from my weird SSD/HDD combo thing? IF that is the case- since Windows was pre-installed on the SSD and I put in a non-combo HDD and ran games from that, would that still be an issue?

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