Getting the most out of my hardware...

[Mr_Gamesmith]

Evening all!

So I recently received a custom rig as a gift from my wife from Overclockers and it's honestly been fantastic, i could not fault it. However over the last couple of months it seems to have... slowed down/started to struggle. Occasionally I'll have graphical hiccups when i download the latest Nvidia Drivers and I'll have to restore my GPU to it's out of the box settings, the fans will ramp up at odd intervals even when the machine is idle and i'm at a paranoid loss as to what to do...

System is as follows;
• AMD Ryzen 5 3400G Quad Core APU
• Gigabyte B450M ATX Motherboard
• Kolink 600W 80 Plus Power Supply
• RTX 2060 GDDR6 Graphics Card
• Vulcan Z T-Force 16GB DDR4 Memory
• HyperX Fury 16GB DDR4 Memory (as a later addition)
• Seagate Barracuda HDD x 2 (1TB & 2TB)

All of this is wrapped up in a neat Phanteks Ephoo Mid-Tower Case which I truly adore, I just want to get the most out of it.

Any suggestions as to improve performance would be greatly appreciated as I know that the 2060 in this rig can run most games (Destiny 2 is a usual favourite of mine) at near max settings but then with games like WoW it struggles with ray tracing which I would have thought would be it's go to as an RTX card...

but yeah, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated

 

[Grimley]

Hello
I'd replace the PSU for starters with this:

My basket at Overclockers UK:

• 1 x Phanteks AMP 550W 80 Plus Gold Modular Power Supply= £86.99

Total: £97.49 (includes shipping: £10.50)​

​

You are not doing yourself any favours with that, It'll probably lead to potential stablity problems in the future as it ages.

Mix & Match Ram doesn't help matters either. if you want 32GB of Ram you're better off having 2x16GB sticks rather than 4x8GB. Some motherboards just don't like having all 4 dimm slots filled.

SSD would help if you don't have one installed & clone W10 onto that, I'm surprised that wasnt included with your spec unless you didn't mention it.

W10 (Windows 10) has a nasty habit of updating itself in the background then not getting rid of the old files which takes up space on your main drive, that fills it up & affects performance. Right click on that drive select properties, disk cleanup. once that opens click on clean up system files & tick all the boxes. the most space will be taken up by either windows update or previous windows installations.

Optional. Upgrade the CPU (R5 3600 would be ideal) they are expensive right now but as stocks dwindle & its replacement becomes available (AMD has not announced this one yet but I'm certain they will) they will come down in price or buy 2nd hand.

 

[Quartz]

AMD Ryzen 5 3400G Quad Core APU

Make sure the onboard graphics are disabled.

Kolink 600W 80 Plus Power Supply

Get a better one.

Vulcan Z T-Force 16GB DDR4 Memory
HyperX Fury 16GB DDR4 Memory (as a later addition)

Make sure each type is in its own bank - don't mix them. Confusingly the RAM banks are not next to each other but interleaved as in ABAB.

but then with games like WoW it struggles with ray tracing which I would have thought would be it's go to as an RTX card...

Not a RTX 2060. RT was essentially a demo / proof of concept on the 20 series.

I'm not seeing a SSD in the build and with hard drives Windows can chug as it updates itself. Really, the best thing to do - other than buy a SSD - is to let it finish whatever it's doing.

 

[Blue160]

Any suggestions as to improve performance would be greatly appreciated as I know that the 2060 in this rig can run most games (Destiny 2 is a usual favourite of mine) at near max settings but then with games like WoW it struggles with ray tracing which I would have thought would be it's go to as an RTX card...

Although an RTX card, the 2060 is the weakest card with ray tracing features and you shouldn’t expect too much from it. Ray tracing has a huge performance impact and you’ll probably have to lower other settings if you want to enable it in some games.

What form do the graphics glitches you are having take? That might be a clue as to if there’s a hardware problem or not.

 

[SkyTerran]

Replace the PSU, update the motherboard BIOS, get a 1TB NVME SSD.