FPS

driver4hire

Alright so I built my computer about 4 months back... Getting straight to the point

 

I am running a Radeon 6950 Dirt3 Edition originally with 8 gigs of cosair vengence series ram.  The blue ninja weapon looking sticks.

 

Today I went out and bought another 8 gigs because it was on sail for 35.99 had to buy it... so cheap for some reason and I figure sometime in the near future ram is gonna skyrocket in price... just a feeling though....'

Started playing games once i had the ram installed and I knoticed an FPS drop on all games... now im thinking its the speed the motherboard set the ram at maybe it slowed it down... checking that once i finish this post. 

 

It is relatively noticeable, we are talking going from 90+ FPS in battelfield 3 on ultra to about 60

 

Looking for any input as to why I lost frames with more ram.

Ridelynn

That is a very large swing in FPS. I don't think it's just the RAM. If you pull the new RAM back out does it go right back to the original FPS?

Check your temps lately? Maybe you knocked a fan cable loose or forgot to plug something back in or something.

Vrika

Large drop, even if the new ram were a bit slower than old one it shouldn't cause that.

Have you checked, if your RAM worked previously as dual-channel, (or triple-channel or quad-channel), then installing the new memory modules broke that.

driver4hire

Checked all cables and everything looks fine.

Temps have been cooler than ever although the processor fan seems to kick on a little more now.  I've got an HAF 212 coolermaster heatsink on the processor and I had to switch the side the fan was on but now it runs cooler than it did before anyways.

I added a top fan to the case when I added the ram so cooling does not seem to be an issue at the moment.  Monitoring my cpu with real temp and my graphics card with sapphire trix.  Graphics card sits at about 61C and processor sits at 35ish.  This is under an Ultra BF3 load.  I'm using that because I do not have that benchmark program installed on this machine.  I do not have a sensor on the ram but I will dig up my IR gun and check it tonight while im running.

 

Ram is dual channel only four ram slots so im assuming that means dual channel.  Is there a way to check and see if placing ram in all four slots on the MOBO will cause it to run as single channel? I feel like asus would do something like this.

  The ram I bought is identical to the ram I had so thats not an issue... 

 

Could it be a power issue?  I have a 750watt supply only... According to those power supply sizing webpages e.g. the one they have on new egg I could easily be using a 550 watt but I am unsure as to how accurate those are.

The speed of the ram did not change from 1600 btw checked that in the bios

 

Thanks for the help so far.

Ridelynn

The motherboard manual will tell you which slots have to be populated in order to activate dual channel; it varies from model to model. With all 4 slots populated with like-capable DIMMs, you should definitely have dual channel access.

But even going single channel memory wouldn't cut your FPS in a third.

It's remotely possible that one of the new DIMMs is bad (or one of the old DIMMs got shocked and is failing). Wouldn't hurt to run Memtest86 for a couple of cycles and just make sure that all the RAM is good.

Perhaps it's a driver problem or something? Typically your computer won't care once it gets more memory (and it already had more than enough to start with). Also, make sure you didn't do something silly like accidently enable FSAAx32 or something that would significantly affect your performance. It would help to have some before/after numbers in more than just one program - it could just be a problem with BF3 and your computer is otherwise fine.

If Memtest comes back good, I'd try pulling the new RAM back out, and seeing if your FPS changes back to your old values.

I won't say it's definitely not a power supply issue, but yea, you could easily be running your system on a quality 500W power supply. Power supply problems are usually indicated by random shutdowns/reboots, BSOD's, and blowing up other components (usually video cards and RAM).