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Question

Cpu/gpu bottleneck to spikey fps/sound in games

Apr 3, 2017 7:19PM PDT

Hello there! Had my computer for about 3 years now and clean it every couple of weeks for up keep. Recently tho it's started spiking in fps and sound so when I play for example a game like overwatch which isn't too computer intensive it spikes half to death and only keeping my cpu at around 17-20% Specs are as follows


Motherboard MSI Z97-G45 Gaming Motherboard - Supports Overclocked Processor - Yes
Processor Intel® Quad Core™ i7-4790 Processor - 8M Cache, 3.60 – 4.0GHz, Hyper Threading Enabled
Memory 16GB - Xidax Performance 1600MHz DDR3 - (2x8GB)
Power Supply Corsair CX500 Power Supply - Bronze Rated
Optical Drive 24X ASUS DVD-RW Combo -
Graphics Card NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 - 2GB GDDR5
Sound Cards Onboard Audio
HDD/SSD Western Digital Blue 1TB - 7200RPM 3.5" HDD -
CPU Paste Standard CPU Thermal Paste -
GPU Paste Standard Graphics Card Thermal Paste -
Cooling Xidax 550LC CPU Cooler -
OS Windows 8.1 64-bit -

Discussion is locked

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Clarification Request
what is "spiking"?
Apr 3, 2017 7:26PM PDT

NT

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Title
Apr 3, 2017 7:31PM PDT

As the title states it's the framerate and sound seems to cut in and out. Framerate likes to skip from 80-16 within a couple seconds and on a cpu heavy game like Black desert I currently am only taking 12% cpu usage. Which is much lower than average.

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You have a graphics card...
Apr 3, 2017 8:20PM PDT

....so why would you expect the CPU to be the problem? Spiking to native english speakers can mean several things, such as "spiking" in the game of basketball, or something that often increases such as speed or occurrence. Perhaps you intended to use a different word? What you described is opposite the word "spiking".

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Answer
Nothing looks amiss with that list.
Apr 4, 2017 9:06AM PDT

Gaming can cause spikes in CPU, GPU use so that's normal.
And complex scenes can cause delays in the display and frame rate drops. So far the only fixes are to reduce settings or go to more powerful GPUs.