Frame spikes every couple of seconds after new GPU

JuanB

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Jan 6, 2012
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I've had my computer for almost a year now and I upgraded my GPU from a HD 6770 to my new HD 7950, . I removed every driver properly and installed the new ones. A couple of months after I've been getting frame spikes with EVERY game i play. It starts out with high framerates then every minute or so the framerates drop to 12 for around 20 seconds. I can pretty much max out every game (League Of Legends, Metro: Last Light, Crysis 3, COD Ghosts ect) and get great frame rates. When playing LoL my ping stays below 50ms so that's not the problem.

I've tried clearing space on my HDD's, installing League Of Legends on my SDD or decreasing the quality of the games. Yet this problem still persists. I've ran CCleaner a couple of times, fixed registry issues, turned off my anti virus (Panda Security) and still no luck.

My System Build: (I have the latest AMD Catalyst drivers 13.12)
Mobo: Asus M5a78l-m/USB3
CPU: AMD FX-4100 (stock speeds)
GPU: PowerColor PCS+ HD7950 3GB GDDR5 Boost State
HDD: WD Green 500Gb
SSD: 128gb Samsung 820
PSU: Corsair CX500
RAM: Corsair Vengeance 8GB

I would appreciate some help on the matter as it really is getting very frustrating to play any game now.
 

Major_Trouble

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Jun 25, 2007
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Sounds possibly like some program is taking CPU cycles - malware???. I don't want to speculate a hardware fault at this stage.

Open task manager and run you game. When the 'spike' is active (you say 20 secs) check with task manager to see what is using CPU cycles. It's easier to do this if you're dual screening or running the game in a window to be able to see task manager than having to Alt-Tab out to it.
 

JuanB

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Jan 6, 2012
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Thank you for your reply,
I also opened up msi afterburner to check temps and GPU usage. Whilst playing Crysis 3 i noticed that when the lag spikes occurred, everything remained the same apart from the GPU usage, it decreased from 55 to about 16-22. All the temps remained steady at around 60 degrees.