Good components, lame gaming performance. What's wrong? :(

In theory, yes. In practice, it depends on your luck with the specific unit.

CX series is meant for office use, definitely not for a high-performance gaming rig (especially not with overclocking - and your CPU is K series, so my guess is you OCed it like most people would).

It is not the power rating that is the issue here, it is the quality of components in that PSU. They are below average, and this can lead to all sorts of issues. Your rig needs 100% stable power all the time for everything to be in order.

Before getting any further into this issue, you need to replace it, since it also looks like this PSU is the only common denominator (not being replaced) since your problem started.

Get Seasonic, XFX, Antec HCG, EVGA B2, Corsair RM. A quality 550W unit will be more than enough, but you might want to go for 620-650 to have more headroom.

Finally, what CPU cooler are you using? Hope it's not the stock one? From the temperatures you listed I guess not, but you never know...

The only way you can be sure is to swap the thing with a better quality unit and test.

This is a great PSU. I would still purchase new - who knows how long has he/she been using this one and under what conditions. And reasons for sale are also something to be considered...

before you rip it up, suggest you goto youtube and look at similar build playing the games you like and note their framerate.

PSU is not apt to cause a drop in frame rate or "constant microstutter "

update: grab some benchmarking tools. Run games that have a built in performance test so that you can compare framerate with exactly the same inputs for the same settings and game scenario.

When you are done you will discover that your PC is underperforming because something is not right (your current assumption) or that an excellent video card like 970 is not strong enough to give you the experience you want. You system has more CPU than GPU and is not $$ balanced towards gaming.

Make sure all of your drivers are up to date and use some programs like MSI afterburner, HWmonitor and CPUz, CINNEBENCH, etc to check whether your CPU and GPU are performing right. Also take a look in your BIOS and manually set all the settings so that everything workst properly. Maybe you have used a program like AI suite, this can mess up your performance a lot. It did to me and it was very hard to get it out of my system again.

The GTX 970 is a pretty high end card right? My asus r9 290x gets 1900 score on unigine heaven extreme preset. Thats a pretty big difference. Go to your windows configuration screen, go to enery settings. Make sure this is set to performance. This could be limiting your gpu.

I just found this article: http://tweakers.net/nieuws/101518/gebruikers-gtx-970-dienen-aanklacht-in-tegen-nvidia-wegens-prestatieproblemen.html
It is in Dutch but it might be worth reading it with google translate. Consumers are sueing Nvidea for bad performance on gtx 970.

Before you waste any more money on diagnosing the problem, take it to a store. Maybe a buisness that build custom PCs or something similar nearby. This will cost something too but not as much as changing all of your components one by one to see if it makes a difference.

The current RM line from corsair is acutally crap.

Just stick with XFX, Antec, SeaSonic, or EVGA

Actually, may I ask when you play games, what is your CPU usage and GPU usage at.

During games..

I'll do a test when I get home.

Are you the op alt account

O.O

lol

Whats op alt? Overpowered alternative?

You seem to be entertaining a delusion that there is a hidden performance characteristic created by the "balance" of CPU and GPU in a computer. I'm sorry to have to break it to you like this, but that is mystical sparkling gerbil droppings.

Performance originates with the CPU. A powerful CPU is required for good FPS in compute intensive games no matter what GPU is selected. An i5 haswell is a good CPU for high FPS gaming regardless of of GPU selection and visual quality goals.

It doesn't matter if you're playing games with a GTX460 on a 720P monitor or with a GTX980 at 1440P, if we want good consistent FPS on either, we have to use a CPU with strong performance in real-time workloads.

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Empirebeige,

It sounds to me like there is something wrong with your computer, either hardware or software wise, that is causing performance glitches and problems. There are lots of possible sources of these problems. Your performance problem obviously has nothing to do with the PSU (FYI: that could have been largely ruled out by running a torture test and observing rail voltages.) And of course, has nothing to do with a bogus theory about hardware balance (^^^ lol).

1. Make sure you're using a clean, direct from MS copy of Windows. No 3rd party modified installers filled with trashware. Set SATA controller mode to AHCI before installation.
2. Make sure you aren't installing or running any active virus/malware protection software. This can interfere with real-time workloads badly.
3. Make sure your motherboard chipset/audio/usb/ethernet/sata drivers are installed. ( http://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/Z87PRO/HelpDesk_Download/ )
4. Make sure your motherboard BIOS is updated... Did you know there have been 11 BIOS updates for your motherboard since release? Several of them mention performance and stability improvements in the notes.
5. Make sure windows power plan settings aren't set too conservatively. The power plan should be set to the highest performance modes available when diagnosing problems like this.
6. Make sure you have all windows updates installed and the LATEST stable GeForce drivers installed from nvidia.

What Specific RAM is installed in the machine right now (model numbers please!)? I get the feeling based on the way you have it listed that it may be a smattering of several different DIMM's or 2 separate kits. You may have memory access stalls and errors causing performance problems if the memory controller is trying to perform rank or channel interleave across mismatched DIMM's. This may be solvable by changing the physical arrangement of DIMM's installed, and which interleave functions are enabled in BIOS, as well as by using manual voltage, speed, and timings. It might be worth running memtest86+ or Prime95 blend testing for a few hours to see if either are generating errors or appear to be stalling.

Troll go read the balance selected for Tom's most recent build, an i3 coupled with an r9 280. Nothing mystical, just engineering. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/build-budget-gaming-pc,4065.html And nothing wrong with a CPU balance, I have that on my PC. Just need to have the right expectations which is what my append says.

The implication of the myth you are perpetuating here, is that empire would get better performance if he had an i3 instead of an i5.

Obviously, that's wrong.

Choosing to balance the budgeting of a machine to achieve the least objectionable compromise between performance and visual quality is normal, and there is no wrong answer to that balance, as everyone has different priorities and different workloads.