Performance seems to drop and then come back

chub · Wednesday at 11:16

Hello all

I regularly take my computer around in the car. Yesterday I set it back up again, for some reason it failed to boot multiple times. Eventually it did work and get through the login stage, but the performance was very slow, it seemed to run at only a few fps on the desktop. After a while it just started working again as usual. I booted it up again today and similar issues, except this time it seems to revert between normal and choppy desktop fps.

As a test I left it on the desktop, which was at this point running fine. I then ran some WebGL graphics, which slowed everything down to a crawl, including the desktop again. The FPS in the WebGL tab showed about 4 FPS, moments later performance went back to normal and I could hear the GPU fans spin up. The WebGL app was now showing normal FPS.

I was wondering whether anyone had an issue like this before? I can't see that there's any issue inside the case.

SpartaP · Wednesday at 13:03

First thing I'd do is open up the PC and have a look if anything has come loose and needs reseating. RAM/GPU etc.

If all is well I'd look at system temps when on the desktop when you experience the stutters and performance drops.

Tetras · Wednesday at 13:47

You're not plugging it into the wrong port (i.e. motherboard instead of graphics card), right?

I'd load up some monitoring software like hwinfo to check on things.

Orcvader · Wednesday at 13:53

I would also have a look at device manager to see if it's properly seeing everything.

chub · Wednesday at 16:26

Thank you all for the advice. I have tried reseating everything, I did at first think this had helped however as soon as I shutdown and come back to the PC I get the same issue on the first few reboots. Eventually, it does then appear to work as normal after 3 or 4 attempts.

It has definitely been plugged into the GPU, although I also tested the integrated GPU which doesn't appear to ever have the issue. Interestingly at one point I noticed in Device Manager that Windows had "disabled" the GPU as there was a problem, this was whilst using the integrated GPU.

I've noticed that whilst the GPU has these issues when under load it only pulls about 50W for a little bit which causes everything including the desktop to lag and then eventually it pulls the full wattage 250 or so.