[Cloudgx]

Hello everyone,

I am currently running a FX 4300 CPU on the M5a78l-m lx3 motherboard, I have tried out a whole lot of things to get rid of my fps stutters and figured out that after a couple of minutes under full load my CPU starts throttling back from the standard frequency 3800 mhz to 3500 mhz, it is kind of fluctuating back and forth differently across the cores(hope I formulated it right). The temparatures of the CPU are ok, way below 40° since I am using the shadow rock tf 2 but they were kinda ok even with the stock cooler. The mainboard temps are rising fast in the first 30 seconds of a stress test and I can tell that the throttling sometimes began even before mobo temp reached 40°. I really don't know what I can do any more to get this pc to run stable, I mean I don't even want huge performance gains just no stutters anymore in old games like cs:go for example.
Pc specs are:
Mainboard: M5a78l-m lx3
CPU: FX 4300 (I own 2 of them, happening on both)
PSU: 500W be quiet system power 9
(Had an ms tech 750W PSU in before and problems were still there after switching to the 500W PSU)
Graphics Card: GTX 970 4gd5t OC(not overclocked it myself, thats the name of it)
RAM: 2x 4GB crucial balistix (tested one of them for 3 hours with memtest86 with no errors and the throttling is the same with only this one installed)
Storage: 250 gb Samsung Ssd

What I did:
Like mentioned I tested a different PSU, a different but identical CPU.
Reinstalled Win 7 64bit, installed it with both ahci and Ide, did the same on a 250gb HDD.
Bought Win 10 Pro 64 bit and installed it in ahci mode on the SSD.
Bought the shadow rock tf2 cooler and installed it after I thought high cpu temps with the stock one were causing the stutters)
Tested with only one of the 2 4GB RAM sticks which I tested for errors.(in the first slot because the Shadow rock tf2 is now blocking the slots and I barely get them out :x )
Did a lot of BIOS tweaking in all directions for example CnQ/c6/turbo on and off, tried overclocking(when I thought it might just been a cpu bottleneck).
I tried underclocking, tried setting everything manually (won't let me set 1,500 dram voltage for some reason, it just doesn't apply even tho my ram has 1,5v on it and SPD says the same),
tried setting all frequencies manually and did stress testing after almost every setting I changed.
I also left everything on auto and checked for any changes after everything I did and nothing helped. Can someone please help a noob out? 🙂
Ps: sorry for the huge text

 

[Redwoodz]

Maybe those VRM's getting hot? That motherboard has no heatsink on them. Try putting a fan blowing on the socket area and see if it helps.

 

[Cloudgx]

Do you think the temp is a problem? I sometimes it started to throttle even at a motherboard temperature of less than 40° or does that tell nothing about how hot VRM's are and if they are causing the throttling due to overheating? I mean shouldn't the system run stable at stock speeds despite the fact there are no heatsinks on the VRM's?

 

[paulerxx]

You're getting stutters due to the CPU being really old, my friend had one not that long ago and he had the same problem.

I would definitely advise upgrading your CPU + MOBO + RAM.

 

[oreonutz]

fcc

Maybe those VRM's getting hot? That motherboard has no heatsink on them. Try putting a fan blowing on the socket area and see if it helps.

Yup. I second that. Its hard to get to the FX Series Processors to Throttle, except for when in cases of the VRM Temps Exceeding The Boards Temp Limit. Some boards Limit is 95c, some are 100c, and some are 125c. I am not familiar with your specific board, but if it indeed as no Heatsinks on the VRMs, I would take a Fan , maybe even 2, and Position them over the VRM and Set the Fans at around 1000RPM at least. FX Boards were bad about putting in a sensor on the VRMs, so it may be hard to gauge how much its helping without getting yourself a K-Type Thermal Couple and Thermometer and sticking a few to the undersides of the Mosfets and then running a Stress Test while paying attention to the Temperatures of the Mosfets, and your Clocks. I would use HWinfo for monitoring your clocks, and see if you can find a sensor in HWinfo that it close to the temperature of the Sensor you stuck to your mosfets. If there is a sensor that is going up and down at the same rate as your Hardware sensor, then its most likely your Software VRM Sensor, and you can start using that to gauge how hot your VRMs are getting.

You can then use the stress test to heat up your VRMs and see at which temperature your VRMs start to throttle your CPU. Once You know it, you can use your fans to try and keep your VRMs below that temperature. Do some testing to see how much RPMs on each fan it takes to keep your VRMs under the Temperature even in high stress situations. Then once you have all that dialed in, you should be able to easily play your game without ever having to worry about your clocks dropping again.

That said, I also used to run an FX 8370, and even with the ASUS Sabertooth R3, which was one of the best boards for the FX Processors and a GTX 1070, My Gaming Performance would be all over the place, and I tested and tested and tried so many different things, and particularly for My VR Titles, I could never get my 1 Percent lows to stay above 60FPS. The Frame Time Consistency on those processors were just crap in certain games, it has to do with the way they set up the architecture with the Cores Sharing FPUs and resources. Some games that didn't really matter for and it was fine, other games it killed the performance, not necessarily on the average frame rate, but more on the frame time consistency, which matters more to a fluid and smooth game play experience.

So if this problems becomes to much of a PIA for you to track down, I would focus your efforts on upgrading yourself over to the AM4 Platform, there are so many good cheap options that you can move over into for not too crazy of an expense. You will still have to upgrade your Memory, CPU, and Motherboard, but you can bring over everything else from your current build, and just upgrade as your budget allows. Right now you can even grab a brand new 1600 for somewhere around $100, a b450 Motherboard for about $65 and a Kit of 16GB of DDR4 3200 For another $65, and then you are set, and in a MUCH better place. Yeah thats still $230 that you may not have right now, but if you can find a way to save and make it happen, your experience will be literally miles better. But if thats just not in the cards for you right now, I would definitely focus on your VRM Temps, and go from there. (There are also Used options that can get you over to the AM4 Platform at an even lower cost that is definitely worth looking into).

 

[oreonutz]

Do you think the temp is a problem? I sometimes it started to throttle even at a motherboard temperature of less than 40° or does that tell nothing about how hot VRM's are and if they are causing the throttling due to overheating? I mean shouldn't the system run stable at stock speeds despite the fact there are no heatsinks on the VRM's?

So I am not sure if you are aware, but every single time you have told us a temperature, instead of getting a number that we can understand we get a number that looks like this: "40°"

Not sure how you are typing out your numbers, but try just using 2 numbers with a "c" after it so we can actually understand what temperature you are trying to say. It looks like you are trying to code your numbers out with HTML or something, and the forum is just not understanding what number you are trying to use.

 

[Cloudgx]

Sry about double posting but it didn't help, mobo temp is 30-35° @Idle and rising fast to 45° nontheless it seems like its only a matter of seconds until the throttling starts no matter what temp there is.

 

[Cloudgx]

40° = 40 degrees celsius

 

[oreonutz]

Sry about double posting but it didn't help, mobo temp is 30-35° @Idle and rising fast to 45° nontheless it seems like its only a matter of seconds until the throttling starts no matter what temp there is.

Are you trolling us??? LOL.

Your Temperature numbers are not numbers, read back your post. Instead of it being a number we can understand this is exactly what you said:

mobo temp is 30-35° Idle and rising fast to 45°

You see how there is more then just 2 Numbers and letter? You should be saying something like the Idle temp is 35c and raising fast past 75c or something like that, but instead you are saying you are idling at "30-35°" and rising fast to "45°" those are just not numbers that we can understand. Please, instead of copying and pasting numbers, or whatever you are doing, just write 2 numbers, for instance if the temperature is 45c, then just put "45c" not "45°" so we can actually figure out what you are trying to say...

 

[oreonutz]

40° = 40 degrees celsius

OK, not sure why you have to put the "°" after it. It would be much more legible if you would just put 40c, or 40 Degrees Celsius like you just put.

But, 45c is not a high number. Not at all. Even on FX, you don't want to go much higher than 68c or so on FX, but 45c is COMPLETELY reasonable.

 

[Cloudgx]

Sorry about that. Will do in the future. ^^

Occt is causing the cpu to throttle like this, if I just run small FFT's on prime for 10 mins I get no throttling of the cpu but still, I know if I start any game now if it's cs:go or world of warships there will be stutters. In cs go it felt like the higher I had the OC the less stuttery it became but that wasn't the case for the other games. Also in cs go the cpu never really clocked out fully, it was like 70% load at high peaks from cpu at a somewhat stable 3200 mhz per core and the gpu was on 20-30% load maybe 40% max. Like I said I first thought it might be just a CPU bottleneck but it barely goes to full load. No matter what I change or do it randomly stutters, mostly when I move or look around, I had weirdly high frame times in loading screens or when I just enter a game it goes up to 500-1000 milliseconds. In game it fluctuates from 5 to 10 ms.gfx card temps are never really high, anyway I also tested a lot in terms of graphic settings, reinstalled drivers, flashed vbios and stuff like that. My graphics card never uses more than 1 gb of vram and even tho there is still free ram it loads a lot into the outsourcing file while gaming. Thats all so confusing, if I had more clue about all this stuff I would have managed to figure out whats causing the stutters by now for sure, I am sitting there since 2 or 3 weeks trying to solve this problem.

 

[oreonutz]

Sorry about that. Will do in the future. ^^

Occt is causing the cpu to throttle like this, if I just run small FFT's on prime for 10 mins I get no throttling of the cpu but still, I know if I start any game now if it's cs:go or world of warships there will be stutters. In cs go it felt like the higher I had the OC the less stuttery it became but that wasn't the case for the other games. Also in cs go the cpu never really clocked out fully, it was like 70% load at high peaks from cpu at a somewhat stable 3200 mhz per core and the gpu was on 20-30% load maybe 40% max. Like I said I first thought it might be just a CPU bottleneck but it barely goes to full load. No matter what I change or do it randomly stutters, mostly when I move or look around, I had weirdly high frame times in loading screens or when I just enter a game it goes up to 500-1000 milliseconds. In game it fluctuates from 5 to 10 ms.gfx card temps are never really high, anyway I also tested a lot in terms of graphic settings, reinstalled drivers, flashed vbios and stuff like that. My graphics card never uses more than 1 gb of vram and even tho there is still free ram it loads a lot into the outsourcing file while gaming. Thats all so confusing, if I had more clue about all this stuff I would have managed to figure out whats causing the stutters by now for sure, I am sitting there since 2 or 3 weeks trying to solve this problem.

Yeah this is the same issue I had back when I used the FX Processor. Again, its just the architecture. Just because you are only seeing 70% CPU Usage, doesn't mean you aren't running into a "CPU Bottleneck". The Cache and FPU is shared on your cores, making it act more like a 2 Core in a lot of the games you play, this makes it so information can't get to the GPU fast enough, and causes your stutters. I don't think you are dealing with a "Throttling Issue" I think you are dealing with a Processor Power Issue, and it would be a wise investment to step up to the Zen Architecture, it is a small investment now, but it means you will get to spend more time enjoying your games, and less time trouble shooting.

For the mean time, I would disable "AMD Cool & Quiet" and any other "Power Saving" Features on the Mobo. This includes "C States" and any other downclocking features. This helps a lot for stuttering type issues on the FX Platform, but you are still unfortunately going to run into issues, and unfortunately that is just the issue with FX. For Watching Videos on the internet, and doing light work, its a decent platform, but for gaming, especially the 4 core chips, its going to perform worse then a 1st Gen i5 from Intel. If you can put up with the occasional stutter, then it will get you by, but if you are sick of the stuttering, I would like to introduce you to a used Ryzen 5 1600 on Ebay, you can get yourself a nice game playing platform with plenty of potential for upgrades for less then $200 used if you use the rest of the parts in your build, and not much more then $200 if you want to buy new. Its definitely worth it.

 

[mattliston]

No, it definitely does not act like 2 cores.


If you go in the BIOS and disable one of the cores in each of the two modules, it will perform worse in anything that is multithreaded.






OP, make sure windows power plan is in "high performance" mode.
Make sure any power saving features are disabled inside the BIOS.


Download a program called "hwinfo64"


Look at all the temps. It is possible that the VRM heatsink of the motherboard has finally gotten hardened and dried up, and causing a big spike in VRM temps under load, causing a quick reaction of throttling.




One thing to consider, an AMD Ryzen upgrade can be had for very very cheap if you go for 1st gen ryzen chips and motherboards. You might be able to do the cpu, ram, and motherboard for under $200 and have a SIGNIFICANTLY faster system.

 

[oreonutz]

No, it definitely does not act like 2 cores.


If you go in the BIOS and disable one of the cores in each of the two modules, it will perform worse in anything that is multithreaded.






OP, make sure windows power plan is in "high performance" mode.
Make sure any power saving features are disabled inside the BIOS.


Download a program called "hwinfo64"


Look at all the temps. It is possible that the VRM heatsink of the motherboard has finally gotten hardened and dried up, and causing a big spike in VRM temps under load, causing a quick reaction of throttling.




One thing to consider, an AMD Ryzen upgrade can be had for very very cheap if you go for 1st gen ryzen chips and motherboards. You might be able to do the cpu, ram, and motherboard for under $200 and have a SIGNIFICANTLY faster system.

LOL. Totally Missed the point my man. It is a 4 Core CPU but due to the architecture, 2 cores share resources. OF COURSE if you disable 2 cores the performance would be worse, lol! (Even if you disable a core in each module, you still are down to 2 Cores, not 4. Now if you have an 8 Core 8350, and you disable 4 cores, but keep 4 of the shared Cores, and run a benchmark that is FP32 Heavy, then disable 4 of the Shared cores so now you have 4 actual independent cores, you will see a MAJOR Advantage for the second test, but again it has to be a test that takes advantage of FPU, in tests that don't you won't see much of a difference.)

The point is, in certain titles that can take advantage of the multiple threads, but also is FPU heavy, it would perform like a 2 Core from the competition. This is just a fact my man. I also run mainly AMD, but just because thats the case doesn't mean I am not going to tell someone else the truth, in certain titles your 4 Core will perform like a 2 Core from a differing architecture that does not share cache and FP32 unit. Look it up if you don't believe me.

That said, the rest of your advice was sound, most of which has already been said, but definitely still sound!