Will Upgrading Fix My FPS etc?

[chronochaz]

HI All,

So a year or so back I was able to ask for advice on what parts to buy for my own high end PC,
which I was very greatful for.
However recently I've been having issues with a few games when I try to run them on Max or near Max settings.

Specifically Borderlands 2 and Sleeping Dogs.
These two games have caused me a fair amount of trouble.

Sleeping Dogs is damn near broken, I can't play it without experiencing massive lags here and there with Crashes to Desktop once or twice.
To be perfectly honest I haven't gone through every possible solution what with the fact that there are so many possibles, and that loads of people are experiencing them.
With Borderlands 2, as long as I set the PhysX to low I can play without too much trouble for a while, but after a few battles it starts to lag.

What with new games on their way (Hitman and Assassins Creed 3) should I take the oppertunity to upgrade, or is my issue likely to be something else? (Such as a fault with my build)

I've decided against following "FinneousPJ"'s guide for requesting new build/upgrade advice as really all I'm after is advice on weather its my current build that's the issue.
With that in mind though I'll list my current specs.

Motherboard: Assus Sabertooth X58
GPU: MSI GTX 580
CPU: Intel i7 950
RAM: (Corsair XMS3 6GB (3 x 2GB) DDR3 SDRAM Memory ) x2 ---> 12Gb of Ram
PSU: XFX 850W
Case: Silverstone Fortress FT02B-W
Heatsink: Thermaltake Frio CLP0564 CPU Cooler
Soundcard: ASUS Xonar
Wls Network Cd: TP-Link TL-WN781ND

SSD: OCZ VERTEX 80Gb
HD: 1TB Samsung HD103SJ SATA F3

I hope you can give me some advice on what I should do.
Thanks in advance!

 

[blazorthon]

Your SSD might be failing. How long have you had it?

 

[Guest]

what drivers are you using?

 

[jay2tall]

To add to looniam's questions. I will just state, you will want to go to Nvidia's site and download the latest drivers. Also, you will want to make sure you have any game updates available for those games.

There is absolutely no reason your system should have issues running any game. The GTX580 is the fastest Nvidia single GPU card from the last series. I had one, it should run everything just fine. I can not said you should be able to run every game on max settings, so if you are experiencing lag, back them off a little bit and see where you are at. However, the crashing should not occur. This can be from a driver issue, temp issue, or maybe bad video RAM.

Once you try updating drivers and game updates and if it still occurs, or regardless, try downloading OCCT. http://www.ocbase.com/ Run both a CPU and GPU test. When doing the GPU test turn on the Error Checking. This will show you if your video ram is reporting errors. I usually run each for 20-30 minutes just for a good to at it. Some people will run the CPU for an hour, but it's preference. Just watch temps and report back. You may have to increase the CPU temp threshold from 85C. I had to because of my overclock which can reach 90 on a full load.

 

[bignastyid]

Go and check.for a firmware update for the ocz drive. Mine bricked 3 times in a 1 year period before they fixed the firmware.

 

[chronochaz]

Thanks for you quick replies.

@looniam
I'm using 306.97 drivers for my GTX, I don't useually go for the beta ones so its the newest stable build. As for the other drivers I'm not too sure.
I know I've updated the BIOS to the most recent one not too long back, I checked.
Which drivers should I be looking at?

@blazorthorn
I got my system in March of 2011 so since then. I use the SSD as a boot drive tho, set it up so most other files land on the standard HD.

@jay2tall
Like I mentioned to looniam above, I have the most recent stable build for Nvidea drivers and the games are done through steam, all ready checked the integrity of cache so they should be fine & up to date.
As for temp, I usually don't have an issue, the case is great for that and I keep it clean, but I'll have a go at OCCT but I've not used it before.

@bignastyid
I'll go have a look now, thanks!

 

[jay2tall]

@jay2tall
Like I mentioned to looniam above, I have the most recent stable build for Nvidea drivers and the games are done through steam, all ready checked the integrity of cache so they should be fine & up to date.
As for temp, I usually don't have an issue, the case is great for that and I keep it clean, but I'll have a go at OCCT but I've not used it before.

I suggested this because I had a 5870 a while back that had very similar issues and Used OCCT to diagnose. I played COD MW2 and another game and were fine, but going to BFBC2 and DIRT2 it would crash after a short time. It ended up being the card and when it hit a certain temp it would give memory errors. COD was not demanding enough to really heat up the card. Now trying to explain this to the support guys was not fun and they sent my card back 2 times, sent a refurb with a defective fan, and finally just sent me a 5970. But thats a fun story for another day.

 

[chronochaz]

I suggested this because I had a 5870 a while back that had very similar issues and Used OCCT to diagnose. I played COD MW2 and another game and were fine, but going to BFBC2 and DIRT2 it would crash after a short time. It ended up being the card and when it hit a certain temp it would give memory errors. COD was not demanding enough to really heat up the card. Now trying to explain this to the support guys was not fun and they sent my card back 2 times, sent a refurb with a defective fan, and finally just sent me a 5970. But thats a fun story for another day.

So I went ahead and ran OCCT (will try and figure out how to post the results here...). Something interesting happened when I ran the GPU on 1920x1080 with (error check). I couldn't see the 3D animation spiral that I saw when I ran it on a lower res, and even when I clicked full screen I only saw a static image with the windows loading symbol for a mouse pointer.
If I went ahead and clicked of it or minimised the full screen/window I saw OCCT come up with tones of errors...
Is this normal? Is it my GPU or the program?
Any general advice on my next step would be greatly appreciated as I'm still encountering the same lags in game.

 

[jay2tall]

Try running it in windowed mode. However, I suspect it is your GPU. It it reports a lot of errors it is most likely your card.

 

[chronochaz]

Try running it in windowed mode. However, I suspect it is your GPU. It it reports a lot of errors it is most likely your card.

I ended up giving up with trying to figure it out and handed my PC over to nearby repair centre to have them have a look at it.
Unfortunately they weren't able to find anything wrong and I'm at a loss as for what to do.
Given that I could probably do with a re-install I'm considering having them re-install windows 7 on my system to save me some hassle but I was hoping you might have some further advice on what could be causing these drops in frame rate etc.
Could it be some junk data kicking about or a hardware fault...

In any case, any advice would be greatly appreciated!