I really need some help with my PC. Here's the background: I have an I5 10400f processor, 16GB of RAM, and a GTX 980ti GPU. About a week ago, I cleaned my PC thoroughly—took out the GPU and CPU cooler, cleaned everything, and repasted the thermal paste. After reassembling it, I noticed my motherboard, an MSI B560M, showed an orange light indicating a RAM issue and wouldn't turn on. I reseated the RAM and it worked. However, the next day, the motherboard displayed both red and orange lights. I had to clean and reseat the RAM again to get it working.
Now, here's where it gets frustrating: when I play games like Valorant, Fortnite, and Counter-Strike, my PC crashes, showing an 'insufficient memory' error. Just yesterday, I started playing Counter-Strike and was getting around 20 FPS, which dropped to 1 FPS at times—usually, I get between 150-200 FPS. I checked MSI Afterburner while playing and saw my CPU was at 100% usage while my GPU was only at 10%. I suspected it might be a virus, so I reinstalled Windows.
Now I'm only getting 40-60 FPS in Counter-Strike, and in GTA 5, my FPS is between 40-50 max, even with high settings (I used to get a solid 60 FPS on ultra). My CPU temps are around 66°C and GPU temps at 61°C. My RAM usage is at about 10-12GB. I'm stumped and would really appreciate any guidance on what might be causing these issues and how to fix them!
3 Answers
Yeah, I've had similar problems where bad RAM caused boot issues after cleaning. It could also be that one of your RAM sticks is damaged. If you can, try running your PC with just one stick of RAM to see if it stabilizes, then test each stick individually.
It sounds like your RAM could be having issues, especially since you're reseating it frequently and experiencing errors with the motherboard lights. If you've already tried cleaning the RAM, you might want to run a memory test. I recommend using Memtest86 to check for any problems with your RAM sticks.
The performance drop could also indicate that something is overloading your CPU. It's weird that your GPU usage is so low; maybe there are background processes or settings that are bottlenecking your performance. Have you checked task manager to see if anything is hogging resources?
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