FPS problem solved (in my case, at least)

[emuthreat 2837]

Clean out your gat-danged computer; all of it!

 

I must admit to a certain degree of noob here, despite having competently built my own computer with NO prior experience in fall of 2011; specs as follows:

 

GigabyteGA-990 FXA-UD3 motherboard, Antec 900 case,   16 GB (4x4GB) Corsair Vengance RAM, AMD Phenom ii X6 1100T CPU, GTX 560 GPU, Corsair TX650 PSU,  Hitachi GST Deskstar 7K1000.D HDS721010DLE630 HDD.

 

I originally built this PC for school; specifically to run Autodesk Revit Architechure for school.  DayZ was the first game i ever played on PC since the early 2000s.  At first I wrote off the performance issues to alpha, but after a while I figured some upgrades were in order. I bought a Mushkin Enhanced 256GB SSD and a EVGA GTX 960, and tried to upgrade to Windows 10; I gave up after multiple failures and installed a fresh copy of win7.  It worked fine for about a month, until the unregistered copy of windows that an acquaintance "helped" me out with started to get cranky.  Bough a brand new copy of Win7 64, and installed it on my second, Mushkin 240GB SSD.  That worked for a day before I started getting boot issues. I decided to test my hardware; the memory in particular.

 

I had to replace the charger jack on an old laptop in order to make a bootable disk of Memtest86, which would run for about 7 minutes before my PC would abruptly power down.  At this point I took apart my computer down to the MOBO inside the case, and found my CPU cooler radiator was completely plugged up just behind the fan; the thermal paste was all dried up and the cooler came off with frighteningly little resistance.  After about an hour of very thorough (and careful) cleaning of the cooler, ram, and MOBO, I moved on to the PSU.  It was fairly dusty and I took off the fan grille and proceeded to carefully blow it out while using a toothbrush to clean the fan blades, and kept a vacuum on to pull away the dust (did this to all case fans, as well).  When I put it all back together, it was deader than before, like completely dead.  I did the G/B wire paperclip jumper test, which it failed, and promptly went and got a new PSU (some shitty Thermaltake 600W jobber with a bunch of ugly spaghetti coming out of it).  

 

Now my PC runs like new, with all the same stuff loaded onto it that seemingly caused the most recent BSODs and boot issues.  Problem solved.

The icing on the cake is that I saw an immediate boost in performance from the low teens to the mid 40s, though I haven't been into any cities yet.

 

 

TLDR:  Clean out your computer case, PSU, CPU cooler, and verify that the thermal paste is in good condition (this means reapply at no more than 2 year intervals)

Heat is the enemy, and it can be difficult to pin down your problems if you have faulty thermal paste of a dying PSU.

 

I would highly recommend using Open Hardware Monitor to check the system voltages and temperatures.  I learned enough from this foray into PC diagnostics that I am now confident enough to go water cooled and maybe try to OC some stuff.  And I will now make a habit of it to reapply thermal paste on a yearly basis.  I hope this helps some of the more novice users to get the frames that their system can deliver, under optimal conditions.  (THAT MEANS OPTIMIZE YOUR OWN SHIT, BEFORE YOU COME ON THE FORUMS AND COMPLAIN ABOUT POOR PERFORMANCE.) 

Edited October 15, 2015 by emuthreat

[Atom Quark 437]

I rebuild by brother-in-laws pc every 4 years for the same reason.

[ispecter 55]

I'm going to sounds like a bit of an ass because DayZ is still not finished but unlike any game for the PC its pretty simple - download and play. Possibly change your in game setting for better performance. Nope not DayZ you need to be a fucking computer wizard to get to 30fps if your lucky. Yet I can play battlefield 4 on ultra with no lag whatsoever. My PC is a newer gen. i5 with 8gp ram. Good G.card. Over all decent gameing rig hard wired to the net. But for whatever reason I can't play DayZ and I'm not gaming with less then 30+ Fps. This game is so not optimized I see why Dean hall ran away from this game. The sad part is and everyone knows how awesome this game could be if it wasn't so broken.

Personally I don't care what they need to do to fix it but do something cut the map in half make the graphic shit I don't care before adding more guns cars and shit make the game playable ffs.

[emuthreat 2837]

I'm going to sounds like a bit of an ass because DayZ is still not finished but unlike any game for the PC its pretty simple - download and play. Possibly change your in game setting for better performance. Nope not DayZ you need to be a fucking computer wizard to get to 30fps if your lucky. Yet I can play battlefield 4 on ultra with no lag whatsoever. My PC is a newer gen. i5 with 8gp ram. Good G.card. Over all decent gameing rig hard wired to the net. But for whatever reason I can't play DayZ and I'm not gaming with less then 30+ Fps. This game is so not optimized I see why Dean hall ran away from this game. The sad part is and everyone knows how awesome this game could be if it wasn't so broken.

Personally I don't care what they need to do to fix it but do something cut the map in half make the graphic shit I don't care before adding more guns cars and shit make the game playable ffs.

After thoroughly cleaning all of my components and replacing the PSU, I can get at least 30 frames on high settings; 60 if there's not a lot to render in the area.

 

At first, I too, blamed it on alpha, and just told myself that getting used to playing at around 10 frames would make me a ninja when optimization kicked in.  Seriously though, monitoring the temps, and making sure that everything is breathing properly (liquid cooler in the mail as I speak) has tripled my performance.  Admittedly, I pretty much only play DayZ, so I can't compare other games' performance.

 

I would strongly recommend checking your thermal paste, and thoroughly cleaning your CPU heat-sink, if applicable.  It made a HUMONGOUS difference in my performance.