Hey guys,
Im having a problem - this is my first post and Im not a hardware guy at all so please bare with me.
I did a lot of research before deciding to post - seems I got conflicting reports but MOST people said this shouldn't/won't be a problem. Im just not so sure myself so I figured someone with experience can help me.
In a nutshell - I have a fairly new PC.... most of the time, games run fairly smooth but on occassion and certain games I get just TERRIBLE frame rates. In Aion (for example), I can't even step inside the Abyss without my FPS nose diving (meannig - 7-12 fps). It seems, doesn't matter what settings or resolution I set the game at - I still get this problem even if I run the resolution at the same as my desktop (or less for that matter). I could run another game (say, WoW for example) and not have my FPS dip below 40... ever.... Then I can plug in X game and it may or may not work - It really just depends. Ive tried benchmarking systems that also seem to score very low for me. I can't seem to find any particular pattern except the game will work fine for the most part and then every once in a while it would nose dive to where I only get 5-10 fps... then it'll sort itself out and go back to normal. I find it very strange that gfx settings (going from min->Max) or resolution makes absolutely no difference in my frame rates.
I've tried everything on my system. Tweaking the CCC settings, updating drivers, running memory tests, formatting/reformatting Windows7, it doesn't seem to make any difference what so ever. Im hoping someone has some idea what could be the problem, here are my spec's below:
CPU - ATI Phenom II 950 @ 2.2 ghz (quad core)
GFX Card: ATI Radeon 4750
Ram: DDR2 4GB
Motherboard: ASUS M3N78 PRO -
http://www.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=DVvm9CU0G1bCC4gp
Operating System: Win7 64 bit Professional
PSU 550W running at about 80-85% (according to the box anyways)
The ONLY thing I haven't tried to play around with is the motherboard. I've noticed that the chipset on this board is basically all nvidia - and since I am running pretty much all ATI products I was wondering if this could potentially be causing me issues. I've researched this as well and 90% of the replies are "no, absolutely not the issue". However, I get a few which says "yes, it WILL work but you might get some sort of conflicts with the onboard gfx card and your current gfx card". Im wondering if the latter is the problem Im running into.
Sorry if these spec's aren't 100% exact - again Im really not that much of a hardware guy... Just trying to figure out where the problem is and for the life of me I can't find it. My CPU seems pretty decent, the card - although not top of the line is not terrible (at least Im told) and although I could always use more ram from what I've read this shouldn't be the bottleneck.
Does anyone have any suggestions on what I can try? Im almost out of options here - about to just go buy a new motherboard with all AMD chips JUST to be sure. I figured - I may as well post first just incase - as I dont' want to spend the money if it's not needed (or worse, I suffer the same performance)
Any advice you can give me I'd really appreciate
Thanks!
P.S My apologies if this is in the wrong sub - forum. I went with what I thought was the best choice