Radeon HD 7770 x2 Slowing Down

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dreamlessmemory

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Jul 24, 2014
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I've been running two Radeon HD 7770s in Crossfire for about ~6 months and I've slowly been noticing lower framerates in all my games, espeically ones where I am well over the hardware requirements. After a bit of investigation, I was noticing that both GPUs were running less than 30% during any game. And the kicker is: dropping graphics settings did little to nothing to improve FPS.

I have tried a host of things but I'm running out of options. While I'm fairly certain it's not a hardware/bottleneck issue (I'd like to avoid getting new hardware since this rig used to work) I'd like some advice on other means of getting my system back up to speed.

Further investigation showed:
CPU temps stayed at 85C at max load, drops ~60C idle
GPU temps were 35-40C the entire time
CPU usage during gaming would bob between 85-95% most of the time

So far I have:
Cleaned out the computer, dusted, reconnected, etc.
Freshly installed the driver package, tried the 14.4 and 14.7 Beta
Unparked CPUs
Disabled ULPS
Used MSI Afterburner to increase power use by 20%
Attempted to run with 1 card (no change/decreased performance)
Attempted to use ThrottleStop (suggested by friend)
Attempted to use GameBooster/AMD Gaming Evolved to cut out extraneous processes (no effect)

Build -
Motherboard: Asrock Z77 Pro3
CPU: Intel i5-3570K
RAM: 8GB
GPU: Radeon HD 7770 x2
Driver: Catalyst 14.4
PSU: 600W

Thank you
 
Solution
CrispyChips
60c Idle and 85c load is WAY hot for a CPU!

Im surprised your whole machine isnt shutting down,you need to do something about those temps.

Also make sure MSI AB controls your videocard clocks and not PowerPlay
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SlayZombi

SlayZombi

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Jan 3, 2014
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Sometimes auto-settings try to conserve power by throttling performance. So you may have to manually overclock it. And your PSU is only 600 watts, maybe the two cards need a little more juice to get the most performance.
 
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dreamlessmemory

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Jul 24, 2014
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I'm away from the computer in question at the moment. I was getting other info that the CPU temps were fine as they are, but I do remember that I needed to reapply thermal paste to this CPU sooner or later. .Fan got knocked around while I was transporting the rig a while ago and messed things up. If it is the thermal paste running out then that does explain the slow decline I've been seeing and not a sudden performance loss. TL;DR: yeah, probably CPU overheat.

That said, I tried to unthrottle it and had no improvements. I think the unthrottling wasn't working anyways, though when I dug through the event logs I wasn't seeng anything saying that the CPU was downclocking itself. It might not, since my laptop when it had a fan issue would post things on the event log about slowing down due to overheat.

Once I get back to it I'll give an update. Thanks everyone!
 
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Rapidz

Rapidz

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Apr 28, 2014
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This. What cpu cooler do u have?
 
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dreamlessmemory

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Jul 24, 2014
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Stock fan atop the heatsink that came with the CPU. It worked well for the years I had it. As I mentioned before, I think the cooling isn't working anymore since I lost a good chunk of the paste when the fan got physically knocked out and I hoped what was left was enough. Looks like I was wrong.

At this point, I'm not surprised if I open it up and the paste is gone and my heatsink has been doing nothing in the past months.
 
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SlayZombi

SlayZombi

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Jan 3, 2014
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Cooler Master Hyper Evo 212
 
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