GTX 670 Underperforming?

[Zekrom]

I'm having some trouble with my new Gigabyte GTX 670.

According to most reviews and benchmarks, this card should score around 8000-9000 on 3DMark11 Performance preset. However, when I run the Performance benchmark, I only get a score of around 2000-3000.

Additionally, Unigine Heaven 3.0 on moderate settings only runs at around 25-30fps... this card should be getting 70+ fps in that program.

I've also been experiencing framerate drops and freezing/stuttering issues in Diablo 3, Skyrim, and Crysis 2. They will all run at 60fps most of the time, but every now and then the sound will start clicking and the game will drop down to like 2-3fps.

PC Parts:

CPU: Intel i5-3570K @ 3.4GHz

Motherboard: Asus P8Z77-V PRO

GPU: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 670 OC Windforce 3X

RAM: 12GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1600MHz

PSU: Corsair TX750M 750W

SSD: OCZ Vertex 3 90GB

HDD: Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200rpm

I have updated to the latest nVidia drivers (301.42 WHQL).

I have uninstalled old drivers and uninstalled the Intel HD 4000 Graphics drivers.

I have updated my motherboard BIOS to the latest revision (Rev. 1015 I think?)

The card is in a PCIe x16 slot (slot closest to the CPU).

The card runs at either 980MHz or 1175MHz during the benchmarks, and during games.

Temperatures hover around 50 degrees Celsius.

Power usage is around 40% (is that normal? should it be higher?)

In the nVidia control panel, all settings are on Default; Ambient Occlusion is turned off, Power management mode is set to 'Prefer Maximum Performance' instead of 'Adaptive'.

I feel like I've tried everything, is it possible that my card is defective?

Can anybody think of something I may have missed?

 

[seumasbeathan]

By power usage do you mean gpu usage, A gpu usage of 40% would suggest a massive bottleneck but looking at the rest of your specs thats can't be, so im sorry mate but I can't help you

 

[J0s3e]

Try uninstalling the drivers, and installing these. Unless of course you have already tried to do so. I don't know if there is any way of trying whether the GPU is using all the cores, sounds like yours might have half of them defective or something.. Sorry to hear that mate

 

[Taurus]

After you uninstalled the old drivers did you run a driver cleaner program? like driver driver sweeper http://phyxion.net/i...er-sweeper.html

I would install this then uninstall graphics drivers via control panel - uninstall a program. Re-boot then run driver sweeper and tick the clean Nvidia-display and Nvdia-Physx. Clean - re-boot then install latest Nvidia drivers from Nvidia's web site and try again.

 

[Rastalovich]

I've not found the likes of driver cleaner necessary for nvidia drivers since... probably the 500 series. Ticking the "perform clean install" should be enough. But if it works, it works.

I'd be interested in having Afterburner installed, and watching the history of gpu use on the graph whilst the bench is running. This can tell you alot.

 

[Yuroko]

Nice post thanks for sharing.

 

[Vicey]

I've not found the likes of driver cleaner necessary for nvidia drivers since... probably the 500 series. Ticking the "perform clean install" should be enough. But if it works, it works.

I'd be interested in having Afterburner installed, and watching the history of gpu use on the graph whilst the bench is running. This can tell you alot.

This is totally true for the NVIDIA drivers. However I have found that it doesn't remove the control panel. This may not seem like a big deal but I had issues changing from 29x.xx drivers to 300.xx because they had changed the control panel specifically for setting up NVIDIA Surround.

I believe they made these changes because with the newer drivers they have included tweaks in the surround system that changes how the task bar and other windows functions are and I believe this stuff is handled by the control panel or its accompanying files. Anyway when I would activate surround I would BSOD instantly every time. Then I tried to downgrade back to the 29x.xx drivers that worked for me and I had BSOD's again when I tried to activate it there.

Both times I did a completely clean install which is supposed to remove everything but it doesn't. It only removes the Drivers. I had to find and delete the control panel myself and then reinstall with the 300 drivers before things worked without kernel panics. I didn't need to use CCleaner though, just deleting the files from explorer was good enough.

 

[Rastalovich]

One sure way of testing you got all the correct stuff is to open the nv control panel and click the system information link in the lower left. The immediate info is general system stuff, but there's also a section for all the versions of the driver components.

They cunningly hide the driver version within the number for some crazy reason, so if you have 302.14 driverset, the components will show xxxxxx30214xxxxxx. The other components external to main drivers, physx, 3d, etc, will/may have their own descriptions.

 

[saltydog]

I thought it was just me I have 2 gigabytegtx 670 in sli and my bench mark was horrid. my set up is Intel core I7 3770k ivy bridge 16gb ddr3 corsair vengeance memory 128gb ocz SSD 1tb 7200rpm HDD gigabyte gtx 670 sli and asus sabertooth z77 mb. And im sucking worst than when i had the single gtx 560 even wei hates them I scored 7.7 before the upgrade than it dropped to 7.4 i also run windows 7 64bit.

 

[saltydog]

As i read more of this thread, i actually think i narrowed my problem down and finally got my wei score to 7.9 and 17729 score 8466 combined on the 3d mark this is way up from my previous 2000 score. What i did was after it crashed running 3d I decided to go into the bios, i disabled igp, i went into the pcie setting and changed it from auto to generation 3 speeds, i set the graphics preset from auto to use pcie slot 1 i think it was? And things seem alot better.

 

[saltydog]

As i read more of this thread, i actually think i narrowed my problem down and finally got my wei score to 7.9 and 17729 score 8466 combined on the 3d mark this is way up from my previous 2000 score. What i did was after it crashed running 3d I decided to go into the bios, i disabled igp, i went into the pcie setting and changed it from auto to generation 3 speeds, i set the graphics preset from auto to use pcie slot 1 i think it was? And things seem alot better.

 

[yassarikhan786]

Nice one saltydog, glad you got it working