Brand new GTX 590 scoring alarmingly low in benchmarks

[Danny_]

Hi,
I recently bought a new PC with dual GTX 590 cards and i7 2600k processor and 8gb of RAM. I've been having difficulty running programs and games on even low setting, so I re-installed windows 7 64 bit very carefully, re-installed all the drivers, etc.. I also read your page about Causes and Solutions for slow PC.

still having problems so I download PerformanceTest to check scores. I noticed that in graphics; 2D (285.2), Simple 3D (1915.9), Medium 3D (1257.1), Complex 3D (52.5), and especially in DirectX 10 (44.4), my computer was very far behind other baselines of GTX 580 and 590 owners. Is there a chance that my video card is damaged?

My CPU mark (5788.0), Memory Mark (1149.2), and Disk Mark (709) also scored low in comparison with other baselines.

I don't think it's a cooling problem because I have liquid cooling and the temperatures don't exceed 50 degrees F. My power supply is Corsair CMPSU-850TXV2 850watt


Any help would be much appreciated

[David (PassMark)]

Your results are clearly low.

Given that the CPUmark and 3D results are both bad I would be tempted to think it is a CPU issue rather than a 3D issue.

The Causes and Solutions for a slow PC post really does cover about 90% of performance issues.

The most common issues would be that you have the wrong number of processes set in the PerformanceTest preferences window, or you are using the 32bit version of the software and not the 64bit version.

After that, for home built systems. temperature (under load) would be the next most common issue. Then BIOS settings.

[Danny_]

Hi,

Thanks for taking the time to respond to my post. I have looked over the Causes and Solutions page again, and I also made sure that I'm using the 64bit version of the software, and that the correct number of processes is set (8 processes).

I downloaded a newer beta driver from Nvidia and ran RegistryBooster 2012 for errors, as well as defragmenting my drive, then I ran PerformanceTest again and I'm still getting low scores

The retailer I got my computer from said they would be willing to send me another graphics card to replace the old one, should I take them up on their offer?

[David (PassMark)]

All those Registry optimization programs are just fraudulent. They do nothing to speed up the typical system.

Windows also has built in defragmentation. So manually running it this rarely helps either. Especially doesn't help 3D and CPU benchmark results. Defininity does't help on a newly installed operating system.

If the CPU result is low then the problem isn't with the video card.

I assume you have run the CPU test a few times and the CPUMark is always around 5700 ?

I would be checking temperatures under load to make sure the heat sink is actually making good contact with the CPU, I would check you clock speeds to make sure you are running at the correct speeds. Also check there isn't some background task eating up the CPU time.

[Danny_]

After reading your post I ran the CPU test a couple of times (making sure no other programs were running) and got scores which were getting progressively worse (7786, 4563, 3184, and the last one was 2580). I then downloaded a few programs which monitor processor core temperatures and saw that all four cores where operating at high temperatures (80-100 celcius).

How is this possible? I thought having liquid cooling would be sufficient for avoiding overheating. I set my clock speeds to the default setting using the program Evga Precision which came with the video card, but this didn't seem to have any noticeable effect.

[David (PassMark)]

Yes. It isn't a surprise.

Overheating is a common issue on home built systems.

Most common reason for overheating is the heat sink contact plate (water cooler block in your case) not actually touching the surface of the CPU.

You used some thermal paste, right?

[Danny_]

To be honest I didn't build this computer myself, I'm very inexperienced with that kind of thing. I bought my build from IBUYPOWER.com during their holiday sale. I'm also not sure what thermal paste is.

Would I be able to fix this heat sink issue myself even though I don't have much previous hardware experience?

[David (PassMark)]

I would be tempted to return it to them in that case.

Is there water flowing in the cooling unit?
If you are really running at 100C, that's the boiling point of water. There might be steam pouring out of the thing

The polished metal surface of a CPU, while it appears flat, is actually fairly rough at a microscopic level. This roughness prevents good contact over the full surface area. So when connecting a heat sink to a CPU a very thin layer of conductive thermal paste is applied between the CPU and heat sink. This allows much more efficient transfer of the heat from the CPU into the heat sink.

This thermal paste looks and feels a bit like toothpaste. But don't eat it. Lots of information on Google about it.