I was trying to figure out why my fps drops with my amd phenom 9850, most of the time I'll be at 38 to 55 fps in tera occasionally cranking up to 80, but a lot of times it'll drop right down to 15.

Using cpu-z I discovered the my cpu multiplier cuts in half as well as the voltage right when i experience these frame rate drops. I get the same issue in dragons nest. I also noticed that I'm using a lower end Asus board. I disabled Cool n quiet as well but apparently I have no option to disable C1E either which are the things that throttle cpu. I also noticed that happens on my cpu directly when it reaches 51 degrees Celsius. My cpu is rated to fail at 61c. at max temps under 100% load my cpu never gets hotter than 52c. Well with in safe range but just enough to trip the throttle.

I investigated further in to asus boards and was told by their customer support that their boards have a thermal throttle because of the cheaper end power regulators they used during the phenom 1 and 2 series run. If your board has an option to disable c1e and cool n quiet try that and see if the fps spikes disappear? I myself can't disable c1e so once i hit 51c my fps will tank to 15 ( since my cpu speed will drop from 2.7 ghz to 1.7ghz). Any suggestions?

I hate to say it but, the only thing I can think of is to throw some money at it.
That it be better cooling or a whole new motherboard.

@sonic how much ram do you have?

Quote: crosshairv on 04/16/2012, 02:38 AM

4 gigs. ddr 2(at 400mhz, if i move it up any more it crashes the pc). when i have about 300 bucks i plan to upgrade the mobo cpu and ram. right now im stuck with what i got. I've got a corsair h50 water cooling kit on the cpu right now though.

i did some test benching with tera the past few days this is what i figured out:
tera has some memory leak issues (bad coding) when you are at 4GB of ram you will throttle and get really low fps no matter what.
what i did was download Memory Cleaner
this will stop the memory leak
Link: http://www.koshyjohn.com/software/memclean/

what happens with memory leak is that the cache from the ram is "leaked" out when using a certain program(in this case tera) and the ram will lose resources which it will have to grab from elsewhere(hard drives) and hard drives resulting throttling.

STEPS to use Memory Cleaner:
1. install it (obviously)
2. once installed run Memory Cleaner
3. a pop up will appear to check for update ( i pressed no)
4. the program will count down from 5 and the program will appear
5. there will be 3 tabs on the window, go to the options tab and check "Clear system cache when usage exceeds 80%"
6. let memory cleaner run in the background and run TERA
~ this should solve some of the fps issues

indeed, but it still doesn't solve my cpu throttling issue which is the brunt of my fps drops. I'll give the ram thing a test though.

Wish i had some advice for you i am using AMD and i rarely drop below 115fps and am mostly locked @ 120fps with vsync on


AMD Phenom II X6 1090T @ 4.01ghz
8 GB duel chan ddr3 @ 1600mhz
XFX Radeon HD 7970 3GB 384-bit x 2 Crossfire
WD VelociRaptor 600 GB - 600 MBps - 10000 rpm x 2 RAID 0
Asus Crosshair III Formula mobo
Planar SA2311W 23 Inch 120hz LCD x 3 running Eyefinity *When available on most games hoping tera will get drivers to support it later.*

http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=2290255

I wish i could afford a system half as powerful as yours right now... was thinking about 8 gigs ddr3 at 1333mhz and a fx4170 with a new mobo. but it'll cost me 320 bucks which right now I'm not sure i could afford. Sucks being on minimum wage.

Quote: dotkom on 04/16/2012, 04:41 AM - view

This system probably costs more than all the PCs I've had in the last 10 years added up.
We have the same motherboard though! Hah.

Quote: Mushimushi on 04/16/2012, 04:49 AM - view


i was tempted to buy the Saber tooth with the 990fx chip set but i was waiting to see if a AMD PCI-E 3.0 was going to be released to get the most from my cards but the answer to that is NO not for awhile at least so i mite be upgrading that part here in the next couple of weeks.