I upgraded from a Ryzen 7 3700X to a Ryzen 5 5600X3D and also installed an RX 9070. Since then, CS2 performance has been much worse than expected: around 150–250 FPS with 1% lows below 100 FPS. HWiNFO shows one CPU core pegged at 100% while the GPU draws roughly half its rated power. Temperatures are normal, XMP and ReBAR are enabled, the BIOS on my ASUS Prime X470-Pro is current, and the system correctly reports the hardware running at PCIe x16. I also used DDU before installing the GPU drivers and MemTest found no memory errors. Clearing the BIOS/CMOS fixed some earlier clock and power fluctuations, but the performance problem remains. HWiNFO reports the CPU cores running around 4.1–4.3 GHz, while AMD Adrenalin reports a lower average. Could this be a chipset or Windows installation issue, or is the motherboard likely responsible?
5 Answers
A clean Windows installation is probably the best next step after changing both the CPU and GPU. Old chipset, CPU, and graphics-driver remnants can sometimes cause strange scheduling or utilization problems even when the hardware appears correctly detected. If you want to avoid wiping your current setup immediately, test with a fresh installation on another drive or partition.
Make sure the CPU clock readings are being interpreted correctly. HWiNFO and Adrenalin may report different averages or effective clocks, so compare the effective clock, CPU package power, and per-core usage while running a repeatable benchmark. Since a single-core Cinebench run reaches the expected boost clock, the CPU is at least capable of boosting normally; that points more toward drivers, Windows scheduling, or game configuration than an immediately obvious CPU failure.
The power supply does not sound like the obvious problem if you’re using a Corsair RM750x, assuming it is healthy and connected properly. Still, reseating the CPU and graphics card and checking all power connections is worthwhile. One CPU core being fully loaded can also simply indicate a game-thread bottleneck, but the unusually poor 1% lows and reduced GPU usage suggest the software configuration should be investigated first.
Clearing CMOS is different from simply loading BIOS defaults, so a full clear is worth confirming, although you’ve already done that. Afterward, leave the BIOS mostly at stock settings except for the required memory profile, then test again. If performance is still poor with current BIOS, chipset drivers, and a clean Windows environment, the motherboard or its firmware becomes a more realistic suspect.
Install the latest AMD chipset drivers manually from AMD's website rather than relying only on Adrenalin or Windows Update. A similar 3000-to-5000-series upgrade caused low power usage and poor 3D V-Cache behavior until the chipset package was reinstalled.
Adrenalin says the drivers are current, but I’ll reinstall the chipset package manually to rule that out.
That makes sense. I may test a fresh Windows installation first so I can compare without immediately losing the current setup.