GeForce GTX660 Problems

[ilikepie]

Hello all, this is my first time posting here because I'm at my wits' end.
I am a PC technician by trade and recently a friend of mine brought his PC in for an upgrade.
We replaced his HDD, PSU, GPU and OS, his previous spec was as follows:

AMD Phenom 9500 Quad Core 2.20 GHz
4GB Corsair DDR2 800MHz RAM
ASUS M3A Mobo
Seagate 250GB IDE HDD
Gigabyte 9600GT GPU
'No name' 450W PSU
Windows XP Home

The new spec of the system after upgrade is as follows:

AMD Phenom 9500 Quad Core 2.20 GHz
4GB Corsair DDR2 800MHz RAM
ASUS M3A Mobo
Seagate 750GB SATA HDD
Gigabyte GTX 660 GPU
Antec HCG-620M PSU
Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit

The problem comes in as follows: he only really likes to play Dota 2, however before the upgrade the game would run at around 35-40fps, after the upgrade it goes down to around 20fps even on minimum settings. Now I know that there are many such reports of Dota 2 under-performing on decently specced PCs but when I run 3D mark Vantage it gets a graphics score of 12k (Edit: CPU score of 5200). This score seems extremely low especially since tomshardware and other sites suggest that the 660GTX should be scoring around 24k....

Diablo 3 also runs at around 40-50fps on medium settings, this too seems way under what this GPU should be putting out.

Is the CPU creating such a massive bottleneck here or is it the mobo? I've swapped out everything besides the mobo and CPU and I'm running out of ideas. Also its very difficult to find an AM2 socket mobo these days so he'll have to buy a new mobo and CPU and I'll look like a douche because I said that he won't need a new mobo yet (very stupid on my part I know).

If anyone has some helpful input I would greatly appreciate it.

 

[NeoXF]

Might be a combination of both, the PCI-E 1.0/1.1 on the board, various cheaper making of the board/chipset (I guess), the CPU, also is that RAM 2x2GB or 1x4GB? Being non-dual channel can also mean it's bandwidth starved.

I found another Vantage benchmark with that card (stock) and a Q6600 OC'd to 3,2GHz getting under 16k point (just under 11k for CPU). While a FX-8350 (1033MHz on GPU) at 4,2GHz getting close to 24k (and 23k for CPU) and a i5-3570K (again 1033MHz on GPU) at 4,4GHz getting 26K (with 24K for CPU). So all in all, it's the old platform you're on bottlenecking you as a whole. I don't know about DIII but you could try playing less-CPU intensive games untill you upgrade the rest.

 

[Darkfalz]

Diablo III is quite CPU limited (particularly performance per core limited, since it's not that well threaded). You could put a 690 GTX in there, the FPS would be the same. Phenom are very weak gaming CPUs.

Dota 2 is probably very CPU limited. Try dropping options like particles, complexity etc. A 660 GTX is massively faster than 9600 GT but the CPU is now painfully holding you back (slow RAM on that platform too).

 

[Assimilator]

1. Take the current motherboard, CPU and RAM.
2. Throw them in the bin.
3. Replace them with an i3 CPU + board + 2x 4GB DDR3-1600.
4. Replace the GTX 660 with a card that more closely matches the performance of components in (3), e.g. a GTX 650.

 

[erixx]

^+1

 

[RCoon]

^+1
Them IDE HDD's need vaporising.
The rest is a mere money sink, ddr2 ram, old phenom etc, waste of time trying to revive.
Cheap option, go the AMD APU route, will run Dota 2 but not overly futureproof.
midrange, go AMD piledriver/intel i3, buy some midrange ram and mobo to go with it. and replace that goddamn HDD

 

[LDNL]

Even though I don't support just throwing money at a problem that cpu/mobo/ram is so old theres no balance with the graphics card. Sure it may have as many cores as any CPU today but the architercture is old and slow. And by looking at some reviews the GPU score in vantage should be around ~25k even with a core i3 2100, or ~20k with a AMD FX 4100.

 

[Darkfalz]

1. Take the current motherboard, CPU and RAM.
2. Throw them in the bin.
3. Replace them with an i3 CPU + board + 2x 4GB DDR3-1600.
4. Replace the GTX 660 with a card that more closely matches the performance of components in (3), e.g. a GTX 650.

Sorry, but can't agree with 4. No point in downgrading the GPU so it "matches". 660 is much faster than 650 and there will be plenty of shader heavy games which perform better even with that modest CPU (and you can run at native res + FSAA etc).

 

[Widjaja]

Yes the Phenom I would be an issue but this still should not cause the system to perform worse since there has been a GPU upgrade.

If anything it may stay at the same fps at least.

There must be some other issues.

Out of curiosity have you tried the new setup with Windows XP?
Just to see if the Phenom one setup has a problem with windows 7 for some reason.

 

[Ghost]

That CPU is a huge bottleneck. Must upgrade.

3. Replace them with an i3 CPU + board + 2x 4GB DDR3-1600.
4. Replace the GTX 660 with a card that more closely matches the performance of components in (3), e.g. a GTX 650.

i3 is a second choice for gaming, right after i5/i7. Any single GPU card will work fine with it. GTX 660 won't be bottlenecked.

 

[syeef]

Yes the Phenom I would be an issue but this still should not cause the system to perform worse since there has been a GPU upgrade.

If anything it may stay at the same fps at least.

There must be some other issues.

You should have seen what happened to my old rig with C2D E8400 when I tried to put a GTX680 in it. The CPU was always 100% while gaming, FPS were lower (compared to 8800GT) and even the sounds were shuttering.

 

[TommyT]

mybe you right about that but how can u compare I3 cpu to an old tech CORE2 ?

its a bit diff belive me i know u can look at my system spec

 

[GamerGuy]

Yes the Phenom I would be an issue but this still should not cause the system to perform worse since there has been a GPU upgrade.

If anything it may stay at the same fps at least.

There must be some other issues.

I agree with you, even if the Phenom CPU is the bottleneck, it should not get lower framerate than with the previous GPU. So, unless migrating form WinXP to 64bit Win7 did cause framerate to plunge (highly unlikely given the maturity of Win7 now), something else is amiss somewhere.

 

[NeoXF]

I love how no one replied anything to my post, which pretty much covers anything he'd need to know.

...Or the fact that he's probably never answering back either.

 

[ViperXTR]

@ilikepie
just a question, regardless of specs (if the thread starter comes back that is), is the GPU and/or CPU having an unusually high GPU usage even when no programs are running? (can be monitored by using MSI afterburner) Since its also possible that he had the same issue when i got my GTX 660, some sort of mallware/bitcoin malware/virus where it eats your GPU (80-100%) and CPU (20-30%) resources in which resulted a very low framerates and scores on tests in my machine.