Hi everybody,
Here are my relevant systems specs:
Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD4H (F7 BIOS)
Core i7 4770k (running stock)
EVGA Nvidia GTX 980 Ti Classified
G.SKILL Trident X Series 16GB DDR 2400 RAM (XMP Profile 1)
Silverstone Strider Gold Evolution 1200W PSU
Intel 520 Series 240GB SSD
Asus PG278Q ROG Swift 27”
The problem I'm having is that when many times on cold boot, when I play a game, I'm getting choppy video/erratic FPS as well as what appears to be low CPU power usage (as low as ~65%). Confirmed with benchmarks as well as at least one game. The solution is ALWAYS to reboot. A few other relevant behaviors of my build:
Don't notice any other other symptoms of some type of lock of power issue (ie. CPU performance/speed is fine)
Occasionally, for as long as I can remember having this setup, my NIC sometimes will not connect to the network, and a quick disable/enable of the network connection always fixes it
On cold boot, one of my case fans does not start immediately (maybe a second or two after power on)...and this used to trigger the fan failure alarm...but I wasn't too concerned so I just disabled the alarm and lived with the fact that it didn't kick on immediately.
I "fixed" this GPU power usage issue for a period of time by resetting BIOS optimized defaults...but the issue has recently resurfaced.
I was thinking about flashing BIOS to F9...but I've read some issues (mainly related to RAM) online after people used newer BIOSes on similar boards. Anyone have any suggestions? Anyone see this specific issue before? I've read plenty online about Gigabyte boards and cold boot issues...but have not found a consensus on a resolution for lower CPU usage (I don't want to try to change PCI-E mode to Gen2 from Auto or Gen3, which I read may alleviate the problem).
Any feedback would be much appreciated as I'd like to fix this damned problem.
Thanks!
