AMD 9370 Unstable?-_-

Hello. First post. I have had my PC for 2 years. I purchased from Ibuypower which I regret. I should have built myself. I frequently game and have had performance issues pretty much since I first received the computer. Performance problems I don't feel are justified. I could be wrong, I am unsure. I will share my pc specs...

Mobo:ASROCK Fatal1ty 990FX Killer
CPU:AMD FX 9370 Eight Core 4.4mhz
GPU: Power Color AXR9 290 4GB 512-Bit GDDR5
RAM:G Skill Ripjaws 16gb DDR3 1600 (8x2)
SSD:Kingston SSD 120gb SATA 6gb/sec
HD:Western Digital 1tb Sata 64mb cache
PSU:High Power 1000w Bronze
Case:Thermaltake Urban T81 full tower
OS:Windows 10 Home x64

Also, I exported my system information and saved the results of a benchmark I will refer to later.

As I mentioned earlier.. the problems I'm about to describe, I have pretty much experienced since I received the PC. Frequently when I game, frame rates vary from say 90fps or 60fps, dropping as low as 15fps. Throughout the time I'm playing, this continuously occurs. About 4 to 10 seconds of good framerates and enjoyable performance to a quick frame drop (down to 15fps, sometimes around 25fps, and sometimes 35fps range) that lasts for about a second or 2 before it goes back to a good frame rate.

Looking for solutions, I have tried lowering graphical settings in various games. Sometimes as low as I can possibly adjust them. The same frame drops occur no matter what settings I change. I have turned to bios and changed some settings. My RAM was clocked at 1333 so I manually changed that to 1600. No harm and seemingly not much benefit with that but maybe a little. I switched an auto overclock setting from 'auto' to 'manual' which opened up the option to adjust CPU and PCI frequencies. CPU was at 200, and PCI was at 100. I did not adjust them because they confused me as far as how it would impact my PC's performance. I disabled Turbo Core Technology but have checked performance with and without it enabled to find not much difference. However things seem better with Turbo Core disabled. CPU voltage was set at 1550 V and AMD Overdrive shows my cores at 4.4 mhz. I haven't changed that.

After looking through and making these changes I thought it would be good maybe to grab a benchmark or two. I purchased 3DMark and found a free Resident Evil 6 benchmark on Steam. First I ran Resident Evil 6. During the RE6 benchmark there is a graph that depicts performance. The line would spike up and down as the benchmark visually reminded me of how video games typically run. Despite the frame drops my PC still scored well.

Next I turned to the 3DMark I just purchased. I installed and ran Time Spy (v1.0). A steady 19-25fps and CPU did 6fps during the CPU test that looked very demanding. What concerned about the results to this benchmark was this: my CPU seems to run at 4.4 and drop to 1.4-1.8 very frequently to almost instantly go back up to 4.4. Is this normal for the CPU to do this?

All in all, I have mainly enjoyed just playing games with friends. But it is very frustrating to have spent so much money on initially buying my computer, to not be able to play games with good performance. If anyone could offer some insight or help I would appreciate it very much. Is it the case that I just don't a system that can run games well? I've seen PCs and even previously owned one that had hardware that isn't better than what I have now, but seem to run consistent and much better than the computer I have. Should I share the benchmark results and my system information to provide more info? I'm to the point I feel like I should just start looking into upgrading hardware maybe one piece at a time and hope that my problem goes away. If anyone could help to maybe figure out why I cannot pull consistent good frame rates when I play games, would be very helpful and I would be very thankful for any ideas opinions.