My newly purchased ASUS Dual OC RTX 5060 is performing strangely in games. GPU usage stays around 50%, power draw is only about 60–70W instead of roughly 120W, temperatures remain near 50°C, and the fans sometimes do not spin. I am getting around 50 FPS in GTA V with all settings, including ray tracing, set to maximum. The same behavior appears in other games.
There is no intentional FPS limit, V-Sync, or Windows power-saving mode enabled. Overall CPU usage is around 50–60%, while system memory usage is about 15GB of 16GB. Closing background applications and reducing memory usage to around 13.5GB does not noticeably change performance.
The problem began after replacing my RTX 2060 Super, which previously worked normally and used more power. I updated the drivers and removed the old ones with DDU. The GPU reaches 100% usage during stress tests, and monitoring shows it running at PCIe 4.0 x8 while gaming.
My system consists of an RTX 5060 ASUS Dual OC, Ryzen 5 5600, 16GB DDR4-2400 RAM, Gigabyte B550M AORUS ELITE motherboard, and Corsair CX550 550W power supply. Could this be a CPU or memory bottleneck, a hidden frame limit, or a problem with the graphics card?
4 Answers
The exact 50 FPS result makes a frame cap, refresh-rate setting, or V-Sync worth checking again, even if you do not remember enabling one. Look in the game settings, NVIDIA Control Panel, GeForce Experience/NVIDIA App, and any overlay or monitor software. Also verify the display refresh rate in Windows.
A stress test only proves that the GPU can reach full load when a workload demands it; it does not rule out a game being limited elsewhere. Test a known GPU-heavy benchmark or game, monitor per-core CPU usage, GPU clock, frametime graphs, refresh rate, and any frame-limit settings. If the card reaches its normal clocks and full power in GPU-bound workloads, it is probably functioning normally and the gaming results are caused by a limit outside the GPU.
A CPU bottleneck is still the most likely explanation. Overall CPU usage can look like only 50–60% while one or two Ryzen 5 5600 cores are fully loaded, especially in GTA V. Check usage per individual core and compare frametimes rather than relying only on total CPU usage. If the CPU cannot submit frames quickly enough, the GPU will remain underutilized and draw less power.
Your DDR4-2400 memory can definitely hurt performance, particularly on a Ryzen system. Confirm in the BIOS and with a monitoring tool whether it is actually running at 2400 MT/s or the default 2133 MT/s, and check whether the sticks are installed in dual-channel mode. Slow or single-channel memory can reduce CPU-limited game performance, although it may not explain every part of the issue by itself.
The CPU may be limiting performance, but benchmark videos with a similar Ryzen 5 5600 and RTX 5060 show considerably higher FPS, and my card is using roughly half the expected power. That is why I am still concerned that something else is wrong.