Poor performance...PSU or RAM bottleneck?

[meowminator]

Well, i recently upgraded to a sapphire 5770 HD 1 gb card

Here are my system specs:
Athlon II x3 2.9 ghz ACCed to a (phenom II X4 b35 2.9 ghz)
4 gb ddr3 ram (1st 2 slots with ocz gold ddr3 1066 and third with 2 gb corsair 1333 mhz)
AsRock 785GMH/128M motherboard
Sappgire 5770 1 gb(juniper 40 nm)
OS: Vista ultimate 32 bit
PSU: a local stock 450 W (single 12v 14 A rail ><)

So it goes like this

I recently upgraded to the 5770 and tried our re5 fixed benchmark to test out he performance....I ran it at 1280 x 1024, 4x MSAA, All details high, and vertical sync off

the fixed benchmark gave VERY varied results, sometimes as low as 57 sometimes 66. So from what it seems like....i suspect it may be a botleneck somewhere, since i have seen weaker systems get higher fps with the card.

And yes the PSU is indeed a weird one....single 14A 12 V rail rail. it also did not have a 6 pin connector so had to use the 4 min molex to 6 pin provided with the card.
I have thought of changing the psu, but the decent ones are really expensive and i am kind of short on budget after buying the card for 210 USD.

Is it really possible for the entire system and that card to operate normally with just a single 12v 14 amp rail though( 12v running at 11.68V)? I havent had any crashes till now. Plus the gpu idles at around 41 and at load is around 63...so it isnt overheating because of lower power either, is it?

i checked AMD overdrive, and the card was using 1.15V when fully active and .95 when not....

Another factor could be the first 2 ram modules running in dual and third in single.......two of them are definitely running in dual as the bios and cpuz show it. Some guides even suggest all 3 may be running in dual.

The I can only only think of these two as the limiting factors....

Please help!

 

[sturm]

I believe your ram is running in single mode for all three sticks. I haven't seen a board that will run in dual and single mode at the same time.

I would get a better power supply no matter what. 14A is pretty low. If that PSU blows it could take other components with it.

 

[notty22]

I think its your psu, or some quality ,driver problem. Even if ram is running in single channel, your gaming performance would probably not be effected much. Based on how little real world difference there is between triple channel and dual channel 'REAL WORLD' differences.
Underclock your gpu by a 100mhz , and see if your scores go down. If there is a psu problem , its not allowing your gpu to run correctly. So your scores should not go down with a underclock.
I get over 100fps with a 4770 with those settings in the re5 bench

 

[meowminator]

notty22, which benchmark are you using? the variable or the fixed? and do you have AF 16x enabled? oh and i am running at 8x multi sample not 4x sorry.

i did notice that the variable benchmark which utilizes mainly the gpu gets around 122-127 average fps in the first zone of the bench, and that doesnt waver much. however the fixed bench does.

also, i have tested the core speeds of the GPU using a few programs when the game was running, at idle it is at 157 mhz and at load at the normal 850/1200, plus it doesnt go above 64 degree load as well.

it may be that my cpu is the limiting factor, or it could be the psu.....but if the card was overloaded would it not just crash or overheat? i tried OCing my earlier one and it crashed when its power requirement went way too high

Edit: it could very well be, that the card may be disabling its shaders/stream processors to save power when the psu isnt supplying enough