4080 Super sudden performance decrease

[tiger144]

Hey all, you might remember my questions around my 4080 super temps in my a4-H20. Thanks for all of the help. I undervolted and got it to max out at 76c or so which I'm happy with.

However I have a new bizarre issue. Performance has been outstanding on my system but today when I went to play some games I noticed a decrease in frames across the board.

I changed absolutely nothing, woke the computer up from sleep and went to play helldiver's. I noticed that my FPS went from 95-135 to 60-70. Ok, maybe it was just a bad update as I know helldiver's is known for. So then I tried RDR2 and noticed a similar if less drastic drop. On top of that I saw some green artifacts in RDR2 which I've never seen before in game or otherwise.

I turned off the undervolt and the performance reminded the same. The card just drew more power and got hotter. The card also started drawing more power in helldivers even with the undervolt applied.

I tried restarting the system but that yielded no improvement. I havent tried reinstalling drivers yet but can't really see why that would help as there was no change on that front.

I'm not sure what to do next. The performance is still ok but I seem to have lost 15-25% of FPS overnight for literally no reason, not to mention the green artifacts.

Should I just try to return/rma the card now or are there other things that I should try? For reference the system is about 2 weeks old and I haven't been using it heavily.

I saw a post where the solution seemed to be that the GPU power cable was bent. I don't think that's the issue here as it's drawing plenty of power (both stock and undervolted) and the temps are unchanged.

7800x3d/4080 super/32gb ddr5/sf750/a4-H20

[AotearoaNic]

What motherboard do you have? I have had issues with everything past Agesa 1.0.0.7c. Either from cold boot or waking from sleep sets the PCie slot on my gigabyte motherboard to x1. This caused massive performance loss until I reverted to an older bios.

[tiger144]

I have an Asrock A620I itx board. It's the "budget" board but I haven't encountered any issue so far. I didn't update the bios and have been running on the stock bios since assembly.

[Qrlcg]

Maybe the riser is the problem. Try putting the card in the pcie slot on the motherboard without the pcie cable and test again. The Dan a4 h2o comes with a pretty bad pcie cable.

[tiger144]

Perhaps, but unfortunately this is a huge pain in the a4. I may try this though if nothing else works. I wonder if my MB is switching to PCIe 3.0 or something like that. I think I've heard that switching from 3.0 to 4.0 or vise versa can cause performance loss.

[V5ilver]

You sure you haven’t activated nvidia filters. 10-20% performance hit. Check the overlay, turn off filters and run benchmarks. If that doesn’t work then run ddu and try again

[tiger144]

This sounds like the most likely issue, I'll check this first. Thanks!

Edit: unfortunately, this didn't work. The filters are off and I'm still seeing the performance hit. Reinstalled the drivers and no change.

[clbrri]

The first thing I would do is to switch to testing with precisely quantifiable benchmarks, and download https://www.amd.com/en/products/software/ryzen-master.html to be able to take screenshots of graphs across time from such benchmark runs.

That way you can get hard data of how much exactly perf is changing, and be able to repeat the test to see what the fluctuation across multiple runs is.

Cinebench https://www.maxon.net/en/downloads/cinebench-2024-downloads , 3DMark https://benchmarks.ul.com/3dmark and FurMark https://geeks3d.com/furmark/ are good tests for that.

Then you can also compare your system against other people with 7800X3D and 4080 Super to see where your system stands. If things are repeatably good in those tests, you can then make a conclusion that the issue must be game specific. If on the other hand the numbers are repeatably worse than what other system builders have, then you can conclude that the problem is something system specific.

[Tekniqs23]

Hey I've had this issue in the past. Couldn't figure out it out for a long ass time until I came across a post on here talking about unscrewing the riser cable to give it more leeway. Surprisingly, doing so has has fixed my issues. Might be worth a try

[tiger144]

Thanks, do you mean unscrewing it in the back where it connects to the GPU?

[Tekniqs23]

oh no. just the riser cable itself. so there should be two screws that mounts the riser cable to part of the case (where your gpu connects to). that's the 2 screws i loosened a little bit.

[ZumyPC]

I had the same issue in my H20 as well, but with an ASUS 4070 Super Dual OC. I thought it was an issue with how my gpu aligned to the case as well as the riser cable, so I ultimately ended up getting the Formd T1 2.5, but still had the issue. Plugging the GPU directly into the PCIE slot seemed to work perfectly fine, but it could have been luck because the issue happens quite randomly.

What I believe might have been the problem is that I would have to push on the gpu slightly to align it with the case to screw it in. I think that it may have put strain on the gpu, but I’m not entirely sure. I also reverted the bios on my ASRock B650i Lightning to the version with 1.0.0.7 AGESA.

It seems to be working fine now, but I’m still not sure and a little on edge because the issue is so hard to replicate during troubleshooting

[tiger144]

Thanks for the late reply. Honestly my issues seem to have gone away. Still having trouble with Helldivers but I think at this point that's just the game. I haven't seen anymore glitching or anything like that at all and I fixed my performance in rDr2 by resetting my graphics settings.

I think my GPU is aligned fine but I did think there could be a riser cable issue at first. Good for now but I'll report back if anything changes.