- Dec 30, 2011
- 7
- 0
- 18,510
I just got a brand new EVGA GeForce 550 Ti for Christmas (the FSB edition with factory overclocking) as replacement for my dying and outdated XFX GeForce 9600 GSO 768mb. The 9600's factory blower had burnt out so i was cooling it with an 80mm case fan. Needless to say, since this was not the intended mode of cooling it was running a bit hotter than i should have; in the low 90s which is very close it its operational limit of boiling point.
Even with the blistering temperatures on my 9600, it still ran games very nicely and i could often max the detail on 1600x900 screen resolution and few games i could pull of 1920x1080 and maintain framerates in the 30s. Most importantly, it ran Crysis 2 at between 25 and 30 FPS on 1280x800 screen res, which was very nice since the 9600 GSO technically doesnt support Crysis 2. It has a 96 shader pipline configuration vs the 8800 GT, the minimum required card, configuration of 112 pipelines.
So installed the 550 into my computer. I downloaded the drivers directly from Nvidia's website. i never use factory drivers. i always go right to the source. I have played through just about every game i own for a good hour or two on my new 550 and one of the things i was noticing was the performance was negligibly improved. In some cases (Crysis games) the performance was degraded.
I have a dual monitor configuration, so i stuck MSI Afterburner on the other monitory and ran Fraps to monitor framerates while i gamed and and I was somewhat shocked to see that the GPU use was seldom approaching its limit even when the framerates were dropping into the single digits. it was typically hanging around 40-50% and the memory use was rarely rising above 250 mb. This was really a drag, especially with Crysis 2. I ran the game on 1080p, which i could never do before, and the framerates were in the 20s - unaccetable. In reduced the resolution back down to 1280x800 and the framerates rose to around the 30 but the GPU use dropped off even further. About the only time i see my GPU being fully used is with Portal 2 (go figure; graphics suck compared to Crysis) or the Unigine Heaven demo.
At first i suspected my power supply since its about 3 or 4 years old but its a 700W with a 48A 12 V rail (actually its a 4 rail system each being alotted 18A - designed to support SLI). I considered my motherboard and processor but i have read plently of reviews that say this card takes almost no performance hit from using an 8x PCIe 2.0 slot (PCIe 1.0a x16) and heard praises from users on dual core processors, same as me.
Im really confused here. My framerates suck, as in 20s and 30s, even on simple games, and the GPU is never seeing over about 70% use. Why the hell is it not using all its resources? Im actually considering switching back to my 9600 GSO which has half the shader piplines, 25% less memory, and lower clock speeds by 400 mhz in every category. Can some one please help?
I already tried the following:
-Clean installing the drivers
-more system restarts than i wish to count
-declocking the card to nvidia's listed specifications on GeForce.com (this actually helped a little getting about +6 FPS)
My system:
Windows 7 Pro 64 bit
MSI K9N6PGM2-V Mobo
4 gb 800mhz DDR2 RAM
EVGA GeForce 550 Ti 1024mb (obviously)
SATA 3.0gbs 7200 RPM 1TB harddrive
AMD Athlon 7550 Dual Core processor @ 2.5ghz (thats an AM2+ socket)
Even with the blistering temperatures on my 9600, it still ran games very nicely and i could often max the detail on 1600x900 screen resolution and few games i could pull of 1920x1080 and maintain framerates in the 30s. Most importantly, it ran Crysis 2 at between 25 and 30 FPS on 1280x800 screen res, which was very nice since the 9600 GSO technically doesnt support Crysis 2. It has a 96 shader pipline configuration vs the 8800 GT, the minimum required card, configuration of 112 pipelines.
So installed the 550 into my computer. I downloaded the drivers directly from Nvidia's website. i never use factory drivers. i always go right to the source. I have played through just about every game i own for a good hour or two on my new 550 and one of the things i was noticing was the performance was negligibly improved. In some cases (Crysis games) the performance was degraded.
I have a dual monitor configuration, so i stuck MSI Afterburner on the other monitory and ran Fraps to monitor framerates while i gamed and and I was somewhat shocked to see that the GPU use was seldom approaching its limit even when the framerates were dropping into the single digits. it was typically hanging around 40-50% and the memory use was rarely rising above 250 mb. This was really a drag, especially with Crysis 2. I ran the game on 1080p, which i could never do before, and the framerates were in the 20s - unaccetable. In reduced the resolution back down to 1280x800 and the framerates rose to around the 30 but the GPU use dropped off even further. About the only time i see my GPU being fully used is with Portal 2 (go figure; graphics suck compared to Crysis) or the Unigine Heaven demo.
At first i suspected my power supply since its about 3 or 4 years old but its a 700W with a 48A 12 V rail (actually its a 4 rail system each being alotted 18A - designed to support SLI). I considered my motherboard and processor but i have read plently of reviews that say this card takes almost no performance hit from using an 8x PCIe 2.0 slot (PCIe 1.0a x16) and heard praises from users on dual core processors, same as me.
Im really confused here. My framerates suck, as in 20s and 30s, even on simple games, and the GPU is never seeing over about 70% use. Why the hell is it not using all its resources? Im actually considering switching back to my 9600 GSO which has half the shader piplines, 25% less memory, and lower clock speeds by 400 mhz in every category. Can some one please help?
I already tried the following:
-Clean installing the drivers
-more system restarts than i wish to count
-declocking the card to nvidia's listed specifications on GeForce.com (this actually helped a little getting about +6 FPS)
My system:
Windows 7 Pro 64 bit
MSI K9N6PGM2-V Mobo
4 gb 800mhz DDR2 RAM
EVGA GeForce 550 Ti 1024mb (obviously)
SATA 3.0gbs 7200 RPM 1TB harddrive
AMD Athlon 7550 Dual Core processor @ 2.5ghz (thats an AM2+ socket)
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram