Hi there,
 
I have been scouring the web for an answer to my performance question.
 
I have a new 1080 SC ACX in a 8700k system and I am getting much lower 3dmark performance than I am finding online, and from a friend who has a SC2 system with a much slower processor.
 
Full specs:
 
Intel 8700k (clocked to 4.6GHZ)
ASRock z370 Taichi
Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB DDR4 3000 C15 (running at 3000)
1080 SC (clocked to 2088 5588)
3x Corsair MP NVME drives (240 boot, 480 storage, 240 linux)
Dark Rock 3 CPU cooler
NZXT s340 (back/ top NZXT aer 120 fans, 2x 140 Be Quiet Silent Wings 3 in front)
 
Some debug info:
 
IDLE GPU: 44c
MAX GPU: 65c
IDLE CPU: 27c
MAX CPU: 77c (4.6ghz)
GPUZ BUS SPEED: PCIe x16 3.0 @ x1 3.0
GPUZ BIOS: 86.04.60.00.80
NVIDIA DRIVERS: 391.24 (Geforce Experience Installed)
Windows 10: Fully up to date
XBOX DVR: OFF
 
My z370 does have the latest firmware, chipset drivers.
 
3dmark:
 
Time Spy: https : // www.3dmark.com/spy/3483545
FireStrike: https : // www. 3dmark.com/fs/15158921
 
More worrying than benchmarks is framerate. In Prey I can get as low as 30, average 45 in the main characters office @1440p. Sometimes hit 60 fps (vsync on).
Rise Of the Tomb Raider (benchmark attached) in geothermal valley regular play is 30-50 fps @1440p.
 
It seems that no matter what I enable in graphics settings (save hairworks in witcher) the FPS does not fluctuate much, it just struggles to keep 60 in certain situations and some frame slowness is noticeable while playing. I can even enable DSR 4x and on Prey it only has a few FPS drop.
 
My monitor is a 1440p Samsung 32 inch connected via display port. I have tried running the benchmarks on a 1080p TV to see if the display was somehow involved.
 
Am I going crazy or is a 3dmark score of 7k the most I can expect from my system? I would imaging it should be 7500+.
 
I have tried:
 
Reseating the card
Full driver reinstall with DDU in safemode
Max prerendered frames 1
Power Management Adaptive and performance
Power management link state power management off
Processor power management min/max 100%
NVIDIA control panel debug mode (decreased score to 6500)
 
Pretty much tried everything the internet has to offer.
 
The last two things I have not tried are using a different PCIe port, my mobo top two slots will run at x16, but the manual prefers top slot, and switching the vbios to the backup.
 
Thanks

A lot of folks that post 3dMark benchmarks have their cards seriously overclocked.
 

"In Prey I can get as low as 30, average 45 in the main characters office @1440p. Sometimes hit 60 fps (vsync on)."
 
Just for the sake of further testing your issue, try playing this game without vsync and report back your FPS results.
Also, did you use GFE to optimize your games?  If so, is there a setting to undo what it did?  (I don't use it so I don't know)

I didn't see your results for Prey without vsync.  Maybe I missed it.
So is there a way to undo a game optimization or is still like the old days where you have to delete the games config file and let a new one be created to get rid of GFE's settings?

You can undo them. Without vsync it varies. The office is he same 40-45 FPS when looking at the main screen. In some areas it gets to 60-65 and some walls I look at can get as high as 140fps. But the average ends up being lower than 60.

You can reset the game optimization. There is no optimization for 3dMark, and I tried prey without them.

Prey is quite old, so it could be an engine / GPU mismatch. Tomb Raider is old as well.

I have not tried any new games like D2 as I have it on ps4.

From the looks of it does anyone think the scores and FPS are lower than they should be?

What are similar 3dMark scores if anyone has them?

Thanks all.

Something is definitely off. Your fire strike graphics score is low. You're scoring what a stock 1080 founders edition card would score at stock settings. Is the card actually running at x16?

Just for comparison, here's my FS score with a stock 1080 FTW (no OC).  My core and mem clocks are running lower than yours and yet my GPU score is higher. >> http://www.3dmark.com/fs/9968111
 

Sounds good, keep us posted...

=)
 
Looks like I was right. Your card wasn't running at x16.

Yep, "x8 3.0" means it's running at x8. The first slot may be running at x1 because of how many m.2 slots you're using, or the pcie2 link speed setting inside the bios is set incorrectly. The pcie2 link speed setting should be set to auto, or gen3, it's always best to manually set it to gen3 though as auto sometimes sets things incorrectly.
 

x8 is definitely enough for now.

I got someone on the phone from ASRock. He said the top lane should be running at x16 no matter what even with all the m2 drives.

He suggested reseating the cpu and mobo to ensure the pins are connected on the processor correctly. Did that, checked for bent pins, no issues. He said if that doesn’t work to rma the board. I bought it from amazon, so I can still swap it out.

Going to try that.

If that doesn’t work he said it could be the processor itself not setting the bus correctly on the first slot.

I doubt that, I think it’s a defective mobo.

I’ll try the mobo first, then rma the processor if that doesn’t work.

On an unrelated note now that the video card is running at 8x it works a lot more, leading to a solid 60 FPS at 1440 max settings in ROTR, but now a side note the fans are louder.

Temp never goes above 72 but wow that card is not quiet.

Going to mess with fan curves.

I appreciate all the tips here, and hopefully someone else comes across this and finds some good help in the future.

:)

True I will try that before going through the trouble of replacing the mobo.

However with the math a single 4 lane m2 would kick the card out of 16 mode, as the cpu only has 16 lanes.

Unless it moves some of them over to the cpu once the amount of pci devices on the chipset exceeds the reserved bandwidth.

Either way... yes will test. Haha.

Ty

Guess it's time to rma then. 

Yes thank you all for the help.
 
The help debugging guide on this forum was a great help too. 
 
It may be prudent to add a detailed (or summary) of the PCIe bus speeds, how to check, and what they mean in GPUz. That was the part of this bout of troubleshooting I found the hardest to decipher. You end up reading a lot of old info, or info about other mobos / cards.
 
Cheers!