PC performance dramatically degraded and no idea whats causing it?

jimbo45 said:

Hi there

apart from poor Disks sometimes some A/V software (particularly MacAfee -- we always called it MacAweful and Symantec is another one with degrading performance too) can really slow a system down.

If you are running home rather than work computers -- my advice would be simply to use Windows Defender and junk any 3rd party Anti Virus software -- especially free versions.

Not sure if the free Anti Virus software any more brings anything at all to the table - especially given the rate and number of Windows 10 updates currently. Things have moved on hugely since Windows 7 days when Windows defender was always a bit of a joke.

Cheers
jimbo

Thanks for the response, I have been running avast for a long time and so far I have had no issues. However I did disabled them and turned off services related to it and still no changes.

bobkn said:

To state the obvious: have you gone into Task Manager and seen whether any processes are eating CPU cycles? CPU usage should be close to zero, normally.

Thank you so much for the response, So yes I had already checked there but the word usage reminded me to check for GPU and CPU usage during the time video game is open and turned out the problem was the low GPU usage on video games and the cause of it was my bios settings.
So what I did set back everything to normal and tried again and I got a little boost, after doing a little bit of more research I turned on XMP profile setting and I did see a noticeable difference, on XMP profile my GPU usage goes up to +%75 usage as opposed to previously 30-40 percent. But I am still not getting the optimized performance which should be 99% average usage on GTA 5, which I also confirmed by checking other benchmark settings and noticed other people with my same system are getting 99% GPU usage on GTA 5.
Another issue is, when I go back to my already tested CPU overclock my GPU usage again drops down to %30-%40, but when I turn back my bios setting to default and turn on the XMP profile on my memory I again get about 75-85 GPU usage.
So now im trying to find out why I cant have my CPU overclocked and not lose the GPU usage and also get full usage on my video card.
Would love to hear back if anyone knows what Im missing?

pezhmank said:

Thank you so much for the response, So yes I had already checked there but the word usage reminded me to check for GPU and CPU usage during the time video game is open and turned out the problem was the low GPU usage on video games and the cause of it was my bios settings.
So what I did set back everything to normal and tried again and I got a little boost, after doing a little bit of more research I turned on XMP profile setting and I did see a noticeable difference, on XMP profile my GPU usage goes up to +%75 usage as opposed to previously 30-40 percent. But I am still not getting the optimized performance which should be 99% average usage on GTA 5, which I also confirmed by checking other benchmark settings and noticed other people with my same system are getting 99% GPU usage on GTA 5.
Another issue is, when I go back to my already tested CPU overclock my GPU usage again drops down to %30-%40, but when I turn back my bios setting to default and turn on the XMP profile on my memory I again get about 75-85 GPU usage.
So now im trying to find out why I cant have my CPU overclocked and not lose the GPU usage and also get full usage on my video card.
Would love to hear back if anyone knows what Im missing?

After further testing, I noticed the same behavior in 3 other games. If I overclock my CPU my GPU usage dramatically decreases, and If I keep my bios setting on default and have the memory profile on XMP profile 1, My performance is normal as intended. This didnt used to be the case. I had this overclock running for more than a year without any issue, This is a recent issue and I dont know why its the case. The overclock guide I used is this: Z370 AORUS Overclocking Guide Intel Core i7 8700K @5GHz - YouTube

The latest video drivers for NVIDIA have been known to have issues with the latest rollout of Windows 10.

bro67 said:

The latest video drivers for NVIDIA have been known to have issues with the latest rollout of Windows 10.

Thanks, did not know that, but I made sure the tests I did was going to be on a driver version I was certain had no issues, so I tested on a few month old nvidia driver.