Out of Pod Experience

So I've recently built a new gaming tower. What's in it is as follows

Motherboard: Z97S SLI Krait Edition
CPU: i5-4690k @ 3.5 Ghz
8 gigs of ram
GPU GTX 960, driver version 347.88 (?) it's the one that just came out, I'm currently installing it right now and the window is blocking the numbers.

These are great specs, you would think it would EAT just about any game I throw at it. The problem is quite the opposite is happening and I'm looking for some help to pinpoint the problem.

What's happening; Just about any game that uses a decent amount of memory is struggling hardcore. EvE runs fine on max graphics every option selected until either A; I go into a data/relic site with the giant cloud that looks like a fart from a cartoon, you know the ones, big rocks everywhere, sometimes has a giant black monolith from a certain 2001 movie... Or when I go to a well endowed POS with a ton of modules in and around it. Then my FPS TANKS and I have no choice but to take everything down to the minimum and end up looking at a screen of 50 shades of grey because I had to turn shaders down to low.

This happens like I said when I do those crazy data sites or around POSs, it also happens when I try to run a youtube video while playing a game, both of them suffer in performance, the youtube video's audio becomes stuttered as does the video and the same thing happens in whatever game I'm trying to play.

FF14, forget about it, running 9-15 FPS no matter what settings I use, maxed out or the lowest possible.

I even reupped my old ass WoW subscription just to see how it would run the game and I'm having the same issues.

What I think might be the cause; the GTX 960 only has 2 gigs of vram, but from what I understand it borrows 2 gigs from your normal ram making it 4 gigs. I also hear that in FF14 it only takes about 1-1.5 gigs of vram to run even with everything maxed out, I'm not sure about EvE though. I feel like it's a vram issue because it's all I can think that's wrong but I honestly have no idea and it's bugging the hell out of me.

If anyone can try to give some insight as to what might be happening it would be greatly appreciated. If you tell me I need to upgrade to the 970 I'll be pretty upset but I think it's something I'm willing to do.

Also no, none of the parts are overheating, I can play EvE all day on max graphics and the parts will still be completely cool to the touch, the fans rarely even turn on on the GTX 960.

At risk of sounding like an ******* but....

Is your monitor plugged into the onboard graphics instead of the video card by chance? GTX960 should be able to run several instances of Eve with ease.

Ok, just making sure because I have seen people plug their monitor into the motherboard instead of the graphics card and could not figure out why they got **** performance.

Getting an i7 would be a waste of money, you do not need to upgrade anything as that i5 should have more than enough power for what you are doing. The i7 is not really much faster than that i5 except at multitasking and multithreaded software anyway.

http://openhardwaremonitor.org/ is a good program to monitor you system stats including CPU/GPU clock speed and heat. I saw that you are looking for one.


Right now i'm guessing you have some faulty hardware somewhere.


Oh I forgot to add...

Make sure your CPU heatsink is seated tightly and correctly. If its not it could be causing the CPU to overheat and throttle itself down causing 100% CPU load and poor performance in games.

don't own 960 my self but fan not turning while game is running even eve sound like card is not being used and or faulty.

i think no matter what fans should run at some low default speed even when low end game is running.

it is possible that psu is not connected on both ways to MB add that is causing lack of power throttling thing left and right.

I may need to get a new heatsink because the one they gave me with the processor is pretty garbage, it attaches to the motherboard with these crappy plastic knobs that lock in with only a quarter turn and the whole thing feels like it isn't tight or even very stable in there.

I'm going to check that openhardwaremonitor link and then I'm going on over to newegg to see if I can find a better heatsink, I didn't know the processor could/would do that. It makes sense too because I was transporting the tower to a friends house to help me with the wiring and the wonderful PA roads knocked the heatsink off on the way and it hasn't sat perfectly since.

Thanks for all the replies guys, you've all been very helpful so far.

Edit: so thank you for that openhardware link, it basically shows the same info as my MSI command center but it was easier to flip between there and FF14 (I'd be testing with EvE but cmon, my last computer was a potato and ran eve fine) much quicker. From what I'm gathering, yes it is a CPU cooling problem 100% lol. Idle I'm between 77-83C and as soon as I started playing the game it was high 90s bouncing off 100C and the load shot from 9% to 100% on all cores.

Believe it or not I actually just bought that one before I read your post, I've heard good things about it before and figured it was time to actually get it. And yes it's poor contact that is the issue, if I push on the heatsink the temperatures immediately drop to the 30s but if I stop pushing it isn't on enough and eases back off rising the temperatures. I'll be happy to have the new heatsink just to have something that bolts in instead of these god awful pins.

Thank you very much for the help, with pressure on the heatsink and testing all the games run phenominally now, even with absolute max settings, I'm so glad it was this instead of a more expensive issue.

edit: I guess goons aren't all bad all the time

Are you multiboxing & multi monitors? If so, running EVE requires more ram & video ram. When I did both on 3x 27in monitors running multiple clients, I had to up the memory to 16gb before it got smoother. Also, turn off Anti Aliasing, set textures to med, turn of POST PROCESSING, effects, & shadows.