Low FPS, High End PC

HellzJanitor

Honorable
Oct 3, 2013
5
0
10,510
Hello,

I somewhat recently purchased a HD 7970 to replace my gtx 470, but it has not performed the way I had hoped. In all the games I play (Bf3, Bf4, War of the Roses, etc), I get pretty low fps. The most odd thing to me is, when I change graphics settings, I didn't improve performance. I can play on High and get low 30's, and play Low and get the same results. I just recently tried playing Metro 2033 and got a solid 15 fps and changed it to low settings and still received that performance...? I have done some troubleshooting using my friends rig. I found that I get similar results when using his 660 instead of my 7970. This points me in the direction of the CPU and MOBO. When I tried monitoring my CPU usage during games, the CPU usage looked very low, below 50%. Besides buying a brand new CPU and MOBO, I'm stumped. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, but please, no "You're CPU is bottlenecking your GPU".

I did reformat, with no avail. I did this because I thought the leftover drivers might be causing my problems. But now, I don't believe it's software related. (besides AMD drivers, they seem kinda screwy)

System Specs:

CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 955 Processor (Recently OC'd to 3.6 Ghz and got much better FPS until randomly, went back to low FPS..?)
RAM: Cosair Vengeance 8 gig X2
MOBO: Gigabyte (The model number is behind the card.. It's AM3 socket)
GPU: Sapphire HD 7970
PSU: Corsair GS700 700 Watt
Drives: I use a OCZ SSD for OS, and a WD HDD for downloads
Windows 7 64 Bit
If you need anymore information, please ask.