Thread: How I came to beat my GTX 1070 issues.

I recently fought a battle just like moving-target with his 1060.
My new shiny GTX 1070 was under performing horribly – only at 56% based on UserBenchmark results.

I had lots of fps drops, stuttering, and sometimes funny bands would appear on the monitor when playing BF4.

Now I knew that most of my issues were due to me being lazy and pulling out my R9 270X and dropping in the GTX 1070 and just trying to get away with a driver update.

That was the big mistake I made, but it helped me fix some other items on the way.

I am going to list the high level various steps I went through to fix my problem. This is from memory so I am sure I left things out.

Maybe I will list that can help the next guy out.

Pre-OS Install

1. Unplugged all USB devices except for keyboard/mouse.
2. Unplugged secondary monitor (I have 2).
3. Opened case.
4. Checked all SATA power and SATA data cables and ensured they were plugged in snugly.
5. Unplugged all hard drives except for OS SSD
6. Shorted CMOS jumper to clear it.
7. Powered off PC and turned it back on.
8. Wait for it to boot and went into BIOS and loaded optimized defaults.
9. Saved settings and rebooted.
10. Went into BIOS again.
11. Set date/time
12. Verify ACHI mode was selected for SATA driver.
13. Went to CPU settings to ensure correct multiplier was selected and core clock was 100. (I have a i5 2500K)
14. Saved settings and rebooted.
15. Closed Case

Windows + Drivers Install

1. Inserted Windows 10 DVD
2. Boot off DVD and installed Windows
   
   • I had to go through multiple reboots as it detected hardware, installed updates, etc.
   • I manually ran Windows update and forced it to update. This ensures any pending driver in Windows update got applied.
   • I went through the startup/shutdown process a few extra times to make sure everything was done in case something was set to upgrade at shutdown.
   
   
3. I went into Device Manager to see if I had any unknown devices. It did not. Window 10 had detected my MB correctly and loaded all drivers for it.
4. Manually created a windows restore point.
5. Went to NVIDIA site and download latest release drivers for GTX 1070.
6. Installed NVIDIA drivers. I choose the default settings and complete the driver install.
7. Rebooted (installer originated)
8. Launched GeForce Experience and turned ShadowPlay off.
9. Rebooted
10. Launched GeForce Experience and verified that ShadowPlay was still off.
11. Manually created a windows restore point.
12. Went to Intel site and downloaded the latest Intel Driver Update Utility.
13. Installed and ran it. I let it apply an update and rebooted.
14. Shutdown and rebooted again until no post windows updates occurred due to hardware changes caused by the Intel update.

Post Windows Install

1. Manually created a windows restore point.
2. Download and installed the following
   
   • Greenshot - a free and open source screenshot tool for productivity
   • 7-Zip
   • HWMONITOR | Softwares | CPUID
   • CPU-Z | Softwares | CPUID
   • GIMPS - Free Prime95 software downloads - PrimeNet [prime95]
   • http://www.userbenchmark.com/
   
   
3. Ran CPU-Z and verified that the CPU was running at the correct speeds.
4. Ran HWMonitor and verified that temperatures for the CPU and Video card were correct for idle speeds.
5. Ran Userbenchmark. My GTX was now reporting at 103%.
6. Ran Prime95, selected Blend test and clicked OK. This will stress the CPU to 100% and generate a lot of heat if you have bad cooling on the CPU. I let this run for 15 minutes and watched the results in both CPU-Z and HWMonitor.

• FYI: If the Package temperature for the i5 2500k CPU exceeds 60 the CPU will throttle itself down. You can see this in CPU-Z on the CPU tab. Watch Core Speed and Multiplier. As it gets hotter it will throttle down. You can also examine the speed of each core in HWMonitor to see if it is throttling them down at different speeds. HOPEFULLY your temperature does not get above 60. In heavy CPU intensive games, the down-throttle = stuttering and may look like fps spikes. This is a sign that you need a new heatsink. I had this exact issue as I still had the stock Intel cooler which I have replaced with an CoolMaster EVO 212.

Plugging Everything Back In

1. Shut down PC.
2. Plugged in secondary monitor.
3. Open case.
4. Plugged in my other 4 hard drives.
5. Closed case.
6. Booted into windows.
7. Went to display settings and configured my primary and secondary monitors based on how I use them.
8. Went into Computer Management->Storage->Disk Management.
9. Found the 4 hard drives and re-dded them without a drive letter.
10. Next I change the driver letter on the DVD to X: (I always do this)
11. Next I assigned a drive letter to the 4 drives in the correct order. I use a volume label naming scheme so I know the drive letter and size of the drive.
12. Shutdown and reboot Windows
13. In file explorer, verified that all 6 drives are available and using the correct letters. 6 is SSD+4 HD+DVD.
14. Plug in my headset and wait for Windows to detect it.
15. Plugged in Bluetooth adapter and wait for windows to detect it. Tried to pair with my speakers and it failed. I fixed this by
    
    • Manually created a windows restore point.
    • Going to the vendor site and downloading the Windows 10 drivers they had.
    • Launch device manager and delete Bluetooth device.
    • Ran vendor driver install and let if finish. It re-added the Bluetooth device again.
    • Rebooted a few times.
    • Successful paired to my Bluetooth speakers – YAHOO!

Preserve Pre-Existing Steam Game Installs

• I have steam installed across multiple drives and I did not want to re-download everything again. I can tell you how to do this if you have already downloaded a ton of steam games and do not want to waste time doing this again. I have over 500 games installed.

Final Steps

At this point, I was easy to test my new GTX 1070 in game to see if I had fixed my fps issues.
I re-installed BF4 via Origin and I have been gaming with it since. So far I have not encountered any FPS spikes or stuttering. I even set resolution to 125% (that Is not video resolution, but I assume texture resolution). I am running a 2560X1440 video resolution. I let BF4 select AUTO for video card settings and it set everything to MAX.

I did not run the other benchmark programs that everyone else has listed. I just rely on in-game performance. I have been leaving HWMonitor running on my secondary monitor when I am in game so I can monitor the CPU/GPU speeds/power consumption and heat to see if anything might cause any throttling under heavy cpu/gpu load.

So far it appears stable.

Final Comments

I intentionally did not do any overclocking tuning during the steps above. My goal was to get everything working stable with stock speeds and with the Intel power management/turbo mode stuff on at its default settings. I would recommend not doing any “tweaking” until your PC is stable and then you can start tweaking those “overclocking” settings.

More Final Comments - Overclocking

I started my overclocking this weekend.. it is going well..

My before benchmark:

ECS P67H2-A2 Performance Results - UserBenchmark

That was on Windows 8.1.

I started overclocking this weekend.. This is my last benchmark with an overclock.

I also swapped out the SSD for a larger one.. I needed the space.

ECS P67H2-A2 Performance Results - UserBenchmark

I have a ram upgrade coming in later this week to replace the 1600 DDR3 with 2133 DDR3.


Here is what is delaying my upgrade from my i5 2500K.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frNjT5R5XI4

^-- That is eye opening!!

That's why I was still running a 3930k. Came out in 2011, but it was king of the non-extreme intel hill. And it's STILL an extremely fast CPU. If I didn't have to buy I new motherboard earlier this week I would still be running it for the foreseeable future. But since I needed a new motherboard and it wasn't compatible with the new 2011v3 motherboards, it was time for an upgrade.

CPUs being the bottleneck these days is almost non-existant except in "budget" cpu cases. Whereas once I was doing a yearly cycle of GPU one year and cpu the next, now it's gpu, gpu, and MAYBE cpu.... but there might even be another gpu cycle in there before cpu upgrade.