So, we've all got that friend, right? You know, the one who spent all his
money on a sick gaming PC, but then you're gaming together and he's all
like, "Man, my PC sucks. It's no good."
But then you're all like, "Bro, you got to get your hitching and starters under
control. We lost again cuz of you." But then your other buddy's like, "That's
good hardware, though. He probably just built it wrong or he misconfigured
something." But then buddy's all like, "No way. I watched Lionus. I got all his
tech tips." But here's the thing. Even
when you're following a guide, it's easy to miss a small detail that can have a
big impact on your gaming experience. And that is what we think is going on
with Connor's computer. He's got a sick rig with an RTX 3080 Ti and an X3D
gaming CPU. And yet, he's constantly bogged down by performance issues. Well,
I think we can fix them. And I've got just the man for the job. Blof. That's
right. It's time to fix Conor's
computer. >> But first, I'm gonna have to segue to
our sponsor, >> MSI. Their MAG 272 QP QD OLED X50
monitor has it all from a 500Hz refresh rate to a 0.03
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description.
My name is Connor and I'm a video editor here at Linus Media Group. Inside my PC,
I've got a 3080 Ti, a 5800 X3D, and
about not about exactly 32 GB of RAM. I
got two of my friends to build my PC for me back in 2019. They watched Linus Tech
Tips, so they knew how to build PCs. Currently, what's wrong with my computer
is that it just slows down all the time. Like I can play one match of a game and
then I start experiencing stutters and the game takes too long to load. The
weirdness isn't only in games. It also happens outside of games as well. So if
I if my computer is stuttering and feeling quite poor, it translates to
like my browser as well. It's not exclusively in games. Today I'm hoping
to just find anything wrong with my PC. I've thrown my head against the wall a
million times and I always get jealous when I use other people's computers. So,
I just want to figure out something that I did wrong over the past 6 years
>> or something that your two friends did. >> Ah, yeah. Something that my friends messed No, it's honestly something that
LT messed up 6 years ago.
>> Connor, we decided to do this video because I was watching the Steam Average
PC and I noticed that you thought that computer with a 3060 and I can't not a
5800 X3D uh was better than this and I
thought that can't be right. >> Yeah, me neither. I don't know. It just felt better. I don't know. What can I
say? I'd be more than happy to play it like this. Probably runs better than my home
PC. >> How long does it take for you to start experiencing issues in a match?
>> A few matches in. It also depends on the game I'm playing, but a few matches in.
Tarov is notoriously bad for memory leaks and everything. Um, but even with
Valerant, a few matches in. Um, I'm teleporting around corners and not in a
good way. >> Oh, that's really bad. >> To be fair, if it's teleportation and
stuff, it might be a network issue. >> Yeah. >> But we'll look at your computer at least
today. M >> we'll try to find out what's wrong with it. Best case scenario, it's something
easy and we fix it almost immediately. In which case, I'll go through the rest
of our beautiful troubleshooting Connor's computer list.
I just want to take a quick look at it and see if there's anything out of the
ordinary. And um I see this fan's not spinning. I don't think I had enough um
fan headers. >> Yeah. Or I'm just Well, on the plus
side, we have a lot of splitters. So, at the very least, I'll make sure all your
fans are spinning. >> Okay. And I see you've got neighbor media capture card.
>> Yeah. >> And then, yeah, power supplies up top. You have any extra hard drives? These
are just empty bays. Oh, no. I believe there's one in each.
>> Yeah. >> Okay. >> And then at least one SSD on this side.
>> It's a little dusty, but it's definitely not the worst I've seen. I do love all
your stickers. >> Thank you. >> I'm a big sticker bomb guy myself. If
anything, I'd put more stickers. I'm a big weeb, so I had to take one off
before coming in, though. >> Why'd you have to take it off?
>> I don't want HR coming after me.
>> I might need you to come back to log into Steam or something for me. Um, but
otherwise, get out of here. >> Bye. >> Get out of here, Connor.
>> Don't type P in the search bar.
>> Step one, check to see if things are just in the wrong spots. Uh, you
wouldn't believe how many times I've looked at a computer that my friend or
someone else has built and they've got the graphics card in the bottom x16 slot
or something like that. His first top x16 is like what I'm assuming is is uh
filled by his GPU. Um, so that's fine.
The memory is in two and four. That's
probably correct, but I will confirm once I get the exact board details and
take a look at the manual. His cables seem nice and seated. Um, he is running
a pigtail on his 3080 Ti. It's unlikely
but possible that that's not enough juice for the single cable. So, if we
have an extra PCIe 8 pin cable, then I might swap one of these out. But
otherwise, you know, it looks pretty normal. That's it for step one.
Everything is connected and it looks like it's all connected in the right
spot. Before we move on, I'm just going to make sure that yes, the RAM is in the
right or wrong slot. I'm going to first figure out what board it is. You don't
need to turn it on. Most of the time, markings are pretty easily identifiable
right on the PCB. And you can see it here, silk screened on, is X470 Gaming
M7, uh, Gaming M7 there. And then there's some MSI logos on the back. And
I just popped that exact X470 Gaming M7
into Google and got the web page from MSI. And it does look
like they're populated in the correct slots, A2, B2. So, the next thing we're
going to do is make sure that nothing's thermal throttling. All right, first
things first. We're going to boot up Task Manager just to make sure
everything is as it should be. We've got our 5800 X3D. Uh, everything looks
correct. It's barely being utilized. Um,
seems fine. Memory though, it is 32
gigs, but Connor does not have XMP enabled,
and it's running at 2133. Uh, for DDR4,
that's the Yep, that's what DDR4 does without XMPP. Um, this is almost
definitely the problem. Let's take a quick look at everything else. It all
kind of seems good. Ethernet is really going. He's probably just downloading a
game or something. It's probably just like some update going on right now. And then his GPU 41C. It's a 3080 Ti. All
right. Not doing anything. Seems totally
fine. Let me get uh Cinebench
and firmware installed. We got Cinebench
R23 installed. Could use R24. Doesn't matter. They're both going to hit the
CPU super hard. And I'm just going to hit CPU multi-core. And I've got
hardware info open so we can watch our temperatures as it runs. Start. It's
going. You know, the Wraith Stealth is not a
bad cooler for a 5800X 3D, I got to say, because while, yeah, we hit like 90 C on
the T die, that's totally fine for Cinebench, we're not going to see those
temps in games. And it's barely 90. This
thing could go even hotter and it'd be totally performant. So, this is probably
fine. Let's run Firmark and see if our GPU has any issues with it. Give this a
good like 10 plus minutes just for it to kind of soak up all those thermals and
then we'll come back and see how it's doing.
We're only maxing out on the GPU hotspot around like 84C. Memory is saying 96.
That's totally fine. GPU temp overall 74. So, I'm going to go ahead and say
that both our CPU and our GPU are running at perfectly normal
temperatures. But you always want to check because it's a really easy way to
lose performance. We're not overheating. So, let's check out our BIOS. I'm going
to turn this on.
Where's this power button? There we go. And then, uh, I'm not going to check.
I'm just going to mash delete. Hope it goes to BIOS.
All right. We got our BIOS up here. It's a little dated. You know, it's say M4.
Uh, but we're going to go to advanced and then actually overclocking probably
OC explore mode normal. Uh, sure. Let's
keep it a normal. That's fine. Game boost switch. I don't know what game
boost switch is. We're going to leave that. But AXMP DRAM setting. Oh god.
Okay. So, we're going from 2133
CL16 to 3200
CL16. XMPP was disabled. We've enabled that
now. That should be a massive uh jump in performance. Okay, we've checked XMPP.
We didn't check power limits. We made this list before I remembered that it
was an AM4 system. That's okay. It's still something you should do if you can
or have to. After you've made your changes, don't forget to hit save and
exit. Probably the first thing I'm going to look at is Connor's startup apps
because uh I'm just getting into Windows. Connor, the next step is
bloatware. >> And I dragged you over here to just make
sure that we can turn off some startup apps because your computer takes forever
to boot. You know this is this is true. >> Yeah. >> What do you not need? Like let like like
>> do you really need Battlelet every single How much Battleet do you play?
Like >> I don't play Battle Net, >> right? You're not even using You're not
using anything from Blizzard anymore. Okay. So that's just getting off. >> Okay. What about EA? You love the EA
app. It's >> I bought it for one game and I'm not playing it. So
>> goodbye Epic Games Launcher. Hell no. >> Goodbye. I don't know what program is.
We're just going to leave it there. >> Okay. >> We just got rid of like at least five,
if not like seven or eight things at startup.
>> Wow. >> I'm not saying this is going to like make your startup be instant.
>> Yeah. >> But it's going to be a little faster. >> Yeah. I I the main reason I haven't done
this is because I thought you had to go into the programs to turn it off. I didn't know you could just do it from
settings. >> I'm learning. go to the startup apps and
just just turn them off. That's crazy.
Now that we've adjusted our startup apps so that a lot less is actually starting
up, what we wanted to do was look at his storage solution. Uh just to make sure
that Yep, there it is. He's got 24.8
gigs left out of a 4655 gig drive.
That's okay. Um but the bar is getting red and I personally like to have at
least about 10% of my storage drive just stay free. I'm going to run Winderstat
just to see what files he's got where and see what kind of space we can free
up. I'm not going to delete anything right now in case he wants to save
stuff, but this way he'll at least have a good idea of where to look and what he
can at least move around cuz he's got tons of other storage drives on here that he can just offload files. Just as
I suspected, he's got 90 gigs worth of videos. Bunch of Valerant and
Counterstrike. Probably some Tarov stuff. Yeah, some Tarov videos here. Um,
these are clips that he might want to keep, so I'm not going to delete them,
but he can at least move them later and free up 90 plus gigs of storage. Uh, and
that should be plenty. As for actual
debloating, um, there's not a ton on here. Yeah,
nothing really stands out here as
particularly bad bloat wear. So, we're
actually going to keep this as is. >> There's your problem right there. fan's
not working. >> The one fan doesn't spin. It ran out of headers and he doesn't have any
Ysplitters. I'm going to fix that for him. >> I'm going to I'm going to give him a
Ysplitter. Also, his none of his RGB works. Uh he doesn't he didn't realize
he needs an IQ link. >> Oh, yeah. >> With IQ. Can we give him an IQ link?
>> Right. Yeah. Yeah. >> We probably have some of those. >> We should give him an IQ test.
>> I haven't finished the entire list as you can see. >> Yeah. But the main thing is it's AM4 and
he's using 32 gigs of RAM and it was running at 2133 MHz.
>> Yeah. >> CDR4 you are going to want to be running
in the sweet spot which is like 50%
higher than that. >> Yeah. He has 3200 mega transfers uh
modules. >> No. >> So it's like perfect. Like he'd go to 36, but
>> but he just didn't enable DOCP >> AXMP or something on this. It's AM4.
It's an MSI board. I don't know what to tell you. So that's disabled right now.
>> Okay. And this is Tarov. Go ahead and try it. It's not super bad, but every
now and then, >> it hitches. >> Did you see that? That was a huge yikes.
>> Right. And so he's talking about how he'll be playing Tarov or whatever and
some guy will come around the corner and his game will hitch and he'll die. >> Yeah.
>> Which 100%. Right. >> Oh, I would die if that happened. >> Totally. And and that's a symptom of um
memory for DDR4 3200, 3600. There's
another one. Perfect. Perfect. >> Oh, I see it now. And you shouldn't be
having those kinds of stutters on a system of this caliber. >> Got a 5800 X3D and a 3080 Ti.
>> Yeah, this is a great rig. >> It should be chewing up this game.
>> Absolutely. >> There's another one. >> So, at this point, I'm going to
reinstall NVIDIA drivers. I noticed that he didn't even have the NVIDIA app on
here. I don't think we need a fresh drive with the games installed. I don't
think I have to receat stuff. Was another bad one. Yeah. Um, and I don't
think we need to check for hardware failures because I, you know, I have to
confirm that it's XMPP. I haven't enabled it and then gamed again. >> Yeah, this is almost certainly that
though. I don't think this is a defective GPU. You're not getting any artifact data. You just have a awful
bottleneck. Yeah, >> I'd say we could even go one step further and turn on PBO boost.
>> Oh, sure. I can turn on PBO. Yep. >> 5800X 3D is not a super power hungry
chip. So, even though we've got a stock cooler on there, I bet we could squeeze
a little bit more out of it. throw a Y splitter to get >> actually might not even turn this one on
>> because what you're going to be doing is you're going to be just >> going straight into that one.
>> Yeah, I don't think this is going to do anything useful. Noctua published that
thing recently where they showed the optimal fan layouts and it really is not
good to just have your intake blowing straight into your exhaust. >> It makes sense. You're just making like
a little wind tunnel. >> Yeah. So, I would maybe even just take it out.
>> Yeah. He's got it reverse. So, this is like intake and then it's exhausting. >> Yeah. probably give it the old
>> I'm going to dust it with a duster and then I'm his cable management is not
great. I'm going to spend 5 10 minutes cleaning up his cables a little bit. >> It's amazing the impact of a small
misconfiguration. Oh yeah. And this is what drives me crazy about the building
PCs is just adult Lego crowd. It's easy for you because you know when you don't
know >> you don't know. >> You don't know. >> You know what the best part is? His his
two friends who built him the computer are fans.
>> Now we're going to update our graphics driver. And Connor uh doesn't have
GeForce Experience or the app. Um but I checked in device manager display
adapters um his 3080 Ti properties. And I can see that his driver date is
actually pretty recent. It's from 2025 May mid May 14th. So that's not too bad.
But we are going to install the NVIDIA app for him. Um just cuz it works fine
and it's a pretty easy way to keep your stuff up to date. Uh and this is super
easy. Just go to NVIDIA's website or just search NVIDIA app. download NVIDIA
app for gamers and creators. But yeah, there's definitely a fresh driver. Um
the newest one's from July 1st. So, we're going to go ahead download install
that. Once that's done, we're going to check and see if there are any Windows updates to install. We'll get those
downloaded and ran. Easy peasy. His new game ready drivers installed. We're
going to click restart later because I want to do all of the Windows updates now. Windows updates.
View optional updates. Uh we don't want to do the Windows 11 stuff. Driver
updates. Anything. Intel Corporation Bluetooth driver. Let's get the Bluetooth driver. And that should be it.
Once all of these updates are finished installing, we'll make sure XMP is
enabled and we'll launch a game and see if any of that stuttering is gone. It
should be. I really hope we don't have to go through any more of our steps. Um,
especially not swapping hardware piece by piece cuz that can can take a lot of
time. All right, Windows is up to date and our memory is running at 3200 megat
transfers per second now, which is much faster and our AM4 platform is really
going to prefer that. So, let's play some games. Let's see if it stutters still. Okay, Tarov is definitely hard to
run. And I'm still getting but I, you know, actually my 1%s are now mostly
hovering above 60. I'm at like 90 80 an
average of 100 something. Um, so I think
it's definitely improved. We're looking pretty good. Don't get me wrong.
Performance could definitely be better. Uh, Tarov doesn't always run great, but
I haven't hitched at all. It's been at least 10 minutes. Um, and on top of
that, I've even gotten a couple kills. >> Nice shot. >> Thankfully, we didn't have to run
through our entire list. It was a pretty simple fix. But just in case you have
to, here's what you'll have to do. An easy but timeconuming trick to figure
out if you've got a software or a hardware problem is to prep a spare
drive with a fresh Windows install, some drivers, and a game or two that you want
to test. Simply swap the drives, boot it up, and if the fresh install behaves the
same, then you've got an answer. And if it doesn't, that's a different answer
entirely. Admittedly, this step is a lot easier for a company like ours with a
ton of spare drives kicking around. But a 256 gig SATA SSD is going to perform
just fine for a task like this and cost what, $20? And as long as you keep it as
your test drive, it's going to last damn near forever. Our last two steps are
really a bunch of substeps. Reseat everything and swap hardware piece by
piece. The first one can be done by basically anybody, even if it's a pain
in the ass. I'm looking at you CPU power cables, but you'd be surprised by how
often the issue is simply a loose connection with your GPU or your memory
modules, especially with a fresh build or a computer you've moved recently. And
finally, if you're all out of ideas, start swapping hardware with an LTT
screwdriver from ltstore.com. I typically sell my old stuff when buying
something new, but keeping some known good memory modules kicking around or
even buying something like a GT1030 just to confirm if your issue is with the GPU
or the motherboard can save you a trip to warranty land. And if you don't have
the spare parts kicking around, local computer shops often do. And if they're
nice, they'll let you test your stuff in their store. It's tough to say what
might be defective, but in our experience, weird random hardware issues
are almost always because of either a bad power supply or bad memory modules.
And if all else fails, cry. But we're not crying today because Connor, I fixed
your computer. >> No way. Well, I'm pretty sure I did. >> I hope so.
>> I hope so, too. Let's wait and see how the boot up time is. It's not like
amazingly better. You were already using an SSD, but you know, we changed those
startup apps and uh whatnot. >> I feel like it's slower than it was
before. >> No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Don't say that.
>> It's on. >> Yeah, that was faster. I could not tell
you. >> It was not a lot faster, but it was a little bit faster. I'm going to take
this as a win. Um, okay. So, your main thing that you did wrong was you didn't
have XMP enabled. >> So, your memory, even though you bought
a 3200 mega transfer kit, >> was only running at like default DDR4
speeds, which is 2133. This should not
only give you better performance in games like in your 1%s and your
averages. Um, but it should fix most if
not all of that stuttering that you were seeing.
>> So, launch Tarov, I guess. So, we'll see
how it feels to you. And, uh, what we can also do is, you
know, you'll take it home tonight. >> Y, >> you game on it for a while. >> Yes, sir.
>> And then let me know. >> I mean, it already feels better for this map because this map is notoriously bad.
>> Does it actually? >> Yeah. I mean, it could just be like my
brain. I'll >> No, no, no. It should It should have like at least a 10% performance boost,
honestly. Maybe even more like 20% or something. >> Normally, when I load into a game,
>> it would feel like kind of sluggish already. >> Right at the start, right as everything
loads in and whatnot. Yeah. >> Right as everything's most competitive
cuz everyone else is loading in. It's not the time to lag. >> Like genuinely, it feel Yeah, it feels
better, eh? >> This is odd. >> Like how good it is now.
>> Yeah. Like my standards for games has been pretty low cuz I just like play at
like 60 FPS or something. Hell yeah. >> But you know what? It's not going to
stutter anymore and you're not going to die. And you guys probably aren't
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description. If you like this video, maybe check out the time we tried to fix
my monitor. Uh, we did fix it. It lasted
another 6 months or so and then I took it to the land at Lionus's house where
it bounced around in my car on the trip there and back and it broke.
But I got six months out of it for like an extra 50 bucks or something so I'm
not complaining. Waifu sticker when
I'd pay for it.