General PC Troubleshooting assistance required

Hi all,

This is not a PoE performance issue as such, rather a general overall performance problem I'm having which is also impacting my PoE gameplay.

The best way I can describe the issue is that my computer is.... slow. For example, If I pick up a window and drag it to the other side of my screen, it has a slight pause and then it feels like it's catching up to my mouse pointer with some minor stuttering. Basically, it's not smooth and seamless like it should be.

Opening a web page takes time and there's noticeable lag. Then there's the gameplay. Lately PoE is struggling to maintain 40 FPS and is frequently dropping down to 2 FPS during game play. I've got all my settings down low and the graphics are downscaling at these times to look like 8 bit 80's gaming and it's still getting me killed.

OK, here's the tech specs:

Motherboard: X399 Aorus Xtreme
CPU: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1900
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX1080Ti
RAM: 16Gb 3200
Monitor: Samsung CHG90
SSD: Samsung EVO 850 Prop 512Gb

This computer should be humming but for some reason it feels like a 10 year old potato and I can't work out why.

I've recently reinstalled windows 10. All my drivers are up to date. I've run checks to confirm that there are no hardware problems such as RAM, CPU or GPU and all checked out.

Computer is not overheating, it's got very good cooling and it doesn't exhibit problems like stability and crashing. The only thing is it feels like it's just stuck in first gear and can't accelerate away.

I've run Task Manager when I have PoE open and 4 Chrome browser windows (just static, not doing anything taxing) and get these stats:

CPU use: 15%
Memory use: 40%
GPU use: 32% - 41%

Running around in the game barely moves the stats, just a percent or two up or down, not hitting extreme spikes and troughs, no real correlation between game lag and the performance of the core items of the PC.

So, any ideas? What should I test next, what diagnostics to run? I'm completely stumped and highly frustrated! Thanks for anyone willing to help out, I would really appreciate it!

did you install the chipset driver ?
Is your bios fully updated?

What kind of antivirus / security solution are you using?

For benchmarks, you can use these :

Cinebench R20 to test your cpu:
https://www.maxon.net/en/support/downloads/

Compare you results here :
https://www.cgdirector.com/cinebench-r20-scores-updated-results/


For your graphic card in DX11:

3DMark Firestrike on steam (Firestrike also has a CPU test)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/402290/3DMark_Fire_Strike_benchmarks/

or

Unigine Heaven
https://benchmark.unigine.com/heaven

You should check in the Task Manager, which processes uses the CPU (the best way is to sort the processes by CPU - by clicking on the "CPU" header).

"

For example, If I pick up a window and drag it to the other side of my screen, it has a slight pause and then it feels like it's catching up to my mouse pointer with some minor stuttering.

Which windows are you moving? Which type of network connection do you use? Have you disabled Windows swap file? Check Windows error log (control panel => Management).

Thanks everyone who chipped in with helpful advice, you guys are legends!

I've finally managed to track down the issue, which was the software that was meant to be running my cooling fans. This was not operating correctly, resulting in the CPU temperature going up, and the system then responded by throttling the performance of the CPU which is where all the slowness was coming from.

I've downloaded an updated version of the software and it works perfectly now. Back to 140 fps in PoE and I can once again dodge things that are trying to kill me :)

Thanks!