I was playing Ark Survival Ascended when my system locked up. No response from the mouse or keyboard, screen frozen, sound loop about 1 second long. I let it sit for a minute, thinking maybe it’ll break out of it, and eventually had to force the power off with the power button.
I restarted my system, and now my performance in games is really bad, I’m getting about 20fps where I used to get 80-100, sometimes it gets so bad it goes into the single digits. I get stuttering sound as well and some pretty bad input lag. In Ark, I can see the textures slowly pop in over time, which normally happens in a matter of a second or two.
Looking at CoreCtrl, if I set it to high performance mode, the GPU’s power usage peaks around 150 Watts instead of 300+.
I’m running Nobara on a 7900X3D and an RX 7900XT with 32GB RAM.
Not sure how to go about diagnosing my issue here. I haven’t made any software changes, so I’m a little lost as to why this would happen.
Update: After trying everything suggested here, and all the googling I could manage, I ended up doing a full reinstall, and kept having issues. Eventually, I narrowed it down to the PCIE riser cable in my case (which I suppose I should have mentioned in the first place) which is supposed to be PCIE 4.0, but it seems to be what was causing my issues. I set my PCIE to 3.0 in the BIOS and everything is fine so far. I don’t notice any performance reduction at all, so it probably wasn’t saturating PCIE 4.0, but the riser isn’t good enough for it I guess.
I would wager on a cooling issue
As far as I can tell, temps are not the issue. The CPU doesn’t appear to go over 70C, and the GPU rarely goes over that as well. The junction temps get pretty hot, but stay under 100.
The performance is also pretty bad immediately after booting or waking up when it hasn’t even had time to heat up. And until this issue happened, everything was running fine for months.
It would not surprise me in the least to find out a big heatmonster like those X3D chips will hit throttling temps at idle if the CPU fans stop spinning. Probably within seconds of booting. Can you check the actual clock speeds of the cores at idle/load? See if you’re geting anywhere close to your 5.whatever ghz.
I’m running a 240mm AIO and the fans are working fine, and CoreCtrl is reporting 5.0 to 5.1 gHz
It’s idling at about 51C, which I think is pretty decent for this chip. When I first put the PC together, it was idling around 60, but I think the waterblock and thermal paste settled, and the temps stabilized.
This happened to me once when an AIO pump failed on me but it sounds like your temps are fine.
Fair enough. Not temps then.
Are all your fans working properly? It might not manifest as a temperature issue if it can throttle sufficiently.
This one, any mention of temps is conspicuously absent. OP should check them immediately.
I’d lean this way too.
Had similar problems when a fan stopped on my CPU.
Now that you mentioned it, I’ve had VERY similar issues on an old machine which had some cooling issues (it’s a laptop, what did you expect?). So I’d wager you’re right.