Is my CPU's 4 pin Motherboard bottlenecking my CPU, or is my Motherboard faulty?

Daniel Thomas

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Jul 27, 2015
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So I've been having this issue none stop as of late, and over the past month, or so I've narrowed down all the possible causes for my issue.

Here are my specs:
GPU: Nvidia GTX 950
CPU: AMD A10 7870K
PSU: EVGA 500W 80+ plus certified
MOBO: ASUS A68HM-E FM2+mATX AMD Motherboard

What is happening is that when I play almost any game I get these very sharp FPS spikes. I'm talking going from 60 FPS to 12FPS for several seconds, and then back to 60. When this happens on the graphs in MSI Afterburner Power, GPU Usage, Core clock, and sometimes memory clock spike like crazy. I had to replace a motherboard with the one I have now, and as a matter of fact before I had this board I didn't have this issue. If I can recall I had a Gigabyte GA-F2A68HM-D3H, and I went through two of them, and both had the same issue, heat, but I never had this sort of issue with my GPU. Also, the GPU isn't overheating or thermal throttling because it hardly goes over 60 C, and its pretty chilly with all fan's on max speed for now. So after a bunch of troubleshooting I feel that my problem is one of two things... Maybe my PSU isn't giving enough power to the CPU because I'm only using one of the Power connectors on the PSU, and the MOBO only has one 4 pin connector.

Not to mention that my previous MOBO had an 8 pin for the CPU, so that is what is leading me to think that its just a power draw issue. The other thing I'm think is that my current MOBO is just faulty, after all I did get it open box, and I have store replacement plan. So I can replace it if I can, but I don't really want to spend that much extra for a new MOBO if my MOBO isn't the issue. After all in a month or two I plan on just completely replacing the APU and what ever MOBO I have in the system, and If I replace the power I'm getting another MOBO that is different from this one, but that one has one 4 pin too, so I I don't want to spend more if I end up with the same issue again. So if anyone can help out any info will suffice.
 
Solution
A 4/8 pin cpu connector is there to power the pcie slots mostly.
Sometimes, it is necessary for a high overclock.
4/8 pin cpu will be appropriate to the motherboard, It should not be a selection criteria.

Daniel Thomas

Reputable
Jul 27, 2015
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4,680

You got a point. I'll replace it tomorrow, and see what happens. One thing I still need to know though, does a 4 pin or 8 pin power connector on the MOBO make any difference in CPU performance? Because if that is the case I should avoid buying a MOBO with only one 4 pin connector.