PC Gaming Rig Being Held Back?

You have a very good all round spec and none of the other components should hold the card back at all.

The performance should be vastly increased vs the 650ti so we can assume something has gone wrong here.

Can you expand on the perfomance being the same? What res and refresh is your monitor? Have you adjusted the gfx settings in games? Which games? How do you know performance is the same (sounds dumb, however would still want to know how you are measuring this)

Answer some of the above and expand a little so we can help better

Is V-Sync turned on? Your monitor most likely is a 60hz one, and with v-sync turned on, your FPS isn't really going to show much improvement if you were already doing good with the 650ti. Your CPU is fine, and you heard wrong about that board.

+1 re the mobo

It is fantastic!

Also, this is why I asked what I asked, as Vsnc won't show your performance gain in terms of FPS, you should see the quality improve dramatically though if you updated the settings

I also suspect V-Sync, but $550 for a 970? I paid $570 for my EVGA 980 Superclocked

Who knows where he is based, prices for PC hardware fluctuate greatly from region to region, even from country to country

The cheapest 970 that I have seen here is Australia is $495. Granted our exchange rate with USD is shocking right now but we still pay a premium.

Yea, I suspected New Zealand or AU.

Couple quick things to check...

Most mobo's only have one PCIe-3.0 slot, so make sure your card is plugged into that slot and not one of the PCIe-2.0 slots.
Are all the power connections on the new video card fully plugged in?
Have you run a benchmark program like Heaven?

Can you run that benchmark at full HD? If your monitor only supports 1680x1050 and at 60hz max, then your monitor might be holding the 970 back like others have said.

For comparison...
My gaming rig has an i5-4690(3.5ghz) and an MSI 970 and when I run Heaven at HD at max settings, my FPS is around 54. My family PC is an i3-4160(3.6Ghz) with an AMD 7870XT and it gets 27 FPS on Heaven. My server is an i3-3225(3.3Ghz) with a GTX 750 and I get 20 FPS on it.

I think your 970 is benchmarking right around where I would expect it. If you want proof, put your 650 back in and run the benchmark using that.

ill be honest i moved from a r9 280x and ive seen a big improvment

yh i get around 58-59 and sometimes 55

It sounds like your expectations on the 970 are a little too high. The 970 should provide around twice the performance of the 650Ti. While that might not seem like a lot, remember that most of the jumps from one level of GPU to the next one only nets you 10-20%, so a 100% jump is quite large.

Case in point. Your old 650Ti could get 50 FPS at 1280x768 where your new 970 can get the same 50 FPS but at 1680x1050. While that might not seem like a big jump in resolution, it’s nearly twice the pixels for the GPU to render, 983,040 vs 1,764,000. Plus every game is different and some games will see a larger increase in FPS than others will.

Also remember that while the GPU is the main factor in your FPS, it is not the only factor. Your CPU, memory, and HDD will also play a role. With that being said, based on your current hardware, most games will be GPU bound as the rest of your system is pretty good. However, upgrading any of those will help boost your FPS, but only by a minor amount.

And like others have said, your monitor could be capping your FPS at 60 no matter what GPU you have.

I'd have to have a look at your system myself. The GTX 970 is around 3-4x faster than the GTX 650 ti. The GTX 760 I replaced with a GTX 970 is already around twice as fast as the GTX 650 ti and the GTX 970 is almost twice as fast as the 760.

You really need to run with v-sync on for the best image quality because screen tearing and judder from running non-native refresh rates actually makes the game look like it's running slower. I'm not sure why gamers run with no vsync unless in a competitive situation or running racing sims where input lag reduction actually makes a difference (rfactor for instance has bad input lag with v-sync so that's understandable but not all games really are that noticable) Running with no v-sync just makes the actual output from the screen look worse and the input lag introduced by v-sync is barely noticeable anyway (if at all) for regular gaming so it doesn't really help running with no v-sync in a majority of cases. Your monitor probably introduces more input lag (or I guess "output lag" would be more accurate) than v-sync by itself unless, like I stated, it's a game like rfactor which just doesn't use v-sync well.

If you got this system prebuilt, then you may just be missing something since it sounds like you are new to this. (no offense, we were all there at some point).

The only other thing I can think of is your processor may be bottle-necking you a bit since I have an I7 4790K I'm getting more potential from the GTX 970 than you but you should still tell a difference between the cards. You have to realize that while the cards themselves may be "X times faster" than one another that there are many other variables that determine overall speed of the system. Some games are more CPU dependent and video card upgrades will not have as much of an effect. However, a faster card like a GTX 970 will allow you to use higher anti-aliasing settings to make games look less jagged and still have high frame rates compared to the GTX 650 TI which would struggle to achieve playable frame rates with high anti-aliasing settings in newer games. The most notable of all these anti-aliasing settings is "super-sampling". Use nVidia Inspector and play with "sparse grid super-sampling" in a game like Assetto Corsa for instance. One reason I upgraded from a GTX 760 was because I could not get above around 45-50 frames while using 4x sparse grid super-sampling (you use this in order to remove jaggies from shadows which are just transparent textures). Now I get well over 60 fps using 4x sparse grid super-sampling and the game looks much cleaner. I have room to spare now even for other higher graphics settings since I'm getting up to 90 fps now... all just from upgrading from a GTX 760 to a GTX 970.

Games might have also changed their auto settings, with the new GPU and monitor. Many games have this, and will adjust for the newer hardware. You were probably running at much lower graphics settings with the old card vs now. Though it might not immensely help, but a slight overclock to 4.0ghz wouldn't hurt. I would recommend a decent aftermarket cooler though.

Man , i have I7 4790k cpu , dedicated gpu is GTX 970 palit jet stream , your is MSI but anyway im getting same problems as u do , i mean i really get low performance in most of games and in some i get more but still doesnt show the beast out of these specs . Im disapointed idk what the problems could be for both of us but is latest hardware should work so good . My friends got AMD computers and much older in specs but they always manage to beat the ass of my computer! cant belive it but now i prefer older hardware than the new. Good luck with your one