If I'm not mistaken, both of those are Bethesda Studio games, a company rather well known for some rather brilliant ideas that utterly fail in their execution. But since there seems to be a common thread with the developer of the games, that is probably your first clue.
Another possibility is that iBuyPower is not exactly known as a reputable company, so it's entirely possible that you were shortchanged on some of the less visible areas of the computer. Like a PSU that was running pretty much on a knife edge to power two video cards or the RAM might well be mismatched. Those would be some other areas to check. If the PSU was barely able to cope with two video cards when it was brand new after "a couple of years" it's entirely possible that it no longer can adequately power two cards at the same time, since PSU's gradually lose capacity as they age.
Yet another possibility that struck me, is that on a lot of motherboards, they might well have two x16 PCIe slots, but if you dig into the fine print you find out that they share half the data lanes. Meaning if you have two x16 cards in both slots, they will each run at x8 speeds or only one will run at x16 and the other x8, it varies by board. In a crossfire setup, I could see that creating issues similar to what you describe. The processor is expecting data to arrive from the second video card roughly twice as fast as it is, so it's stuck waiting. The games that run well could simply be ignoring the second card.
Try having someone come along and physically remove one of the two video cards, disabling SLI isn't enough, to see if that helps. Quite frankly, you'd probably be better served selling the second card because unless you're using the second card as like a dedicated PhysX type processor, it doesn't do you as much good in most gaming scenarios as you might think. See how things work with just one card and go from there.
Also, as a parting thought, next time you're looking to buy a computer, probably better to avoid iBuyPower and CyberPowerPC.
Hello all. I have a desktop PC w/ an i7 processor, dual HD 7770 gpu's & crossfire, 12 GB RAM. It's a pre-built PC from iBUYPOWER with Windows 7 64-bit. A few years ago when I bought Skyrim, it just didn't feel smooth when I would run around in the open world and in dungeons - the graphics looked great, but when my character would move, it was "jumpy" and the frame rate seemed to be going up and down even on the lowest graphics settings. I gave up on the PC version of the game, and assumed my PC just wasn't powerful enough to run it (I don't know very much about computers). It runs games like World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2 on max settings perfectly fine, but I just bought Morrowind for a nostalgia trip and I encountered the exact same problem I had with Skyrim. Considering the relative power of my machine and the fact that Morrowind is 12 years old, I have no clue why this is happening. I have tried disabling Crossfire and it didn't help. All settings are on default for my graphics card - no overclocking. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks
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