I’ve started running into some weird issues with my keyboard (a Razer BlackWidow that’s about 5 years old) and I think my mouse might be acting up too (a Razer Basilisk Ultimate that's only a month old).
Basically, the keyboard feels like it's lagging, and it isn't registering keypresses properly.
For instance, when I'm typing, sometimes a letter just won't show up even though I definitely pressed the key, other times it'll double-type a single press, and occasionally there's this half-second lag before the character actually appears on screen.
It's even worse in games. If I'm holding down 'W' to move forward, my character will suddenly stop as if I let go of the key. If I'm just standing still and tap 'W', the character will jerk forward for a split second and then stop immediately, like I tapped it super fast. The same thing happens with sprinting—I'll be holding Shift to sprint, and my character will randomly stop sprinting and just walk forward instead.
As for the mouse, I noticed a similar issue with the right button I use for zooming; sometimes the zoom just cuts out completely even while I'm holding the button down.
I've ruled out user error because there's no way I'm missing my keys or losing my grip that often. I've already tried reinstalling the drivers through the official apps, my BIOS is fully up to date, chipset drivers are installed, and I've swapped between different USB ports. I even did a clean reinstall of macOS (it happened on my previous OS too), tweaked the repeat rate and delay settings, and made sure Filter and Sticky Keys are all turned off.
I'm honestly at a loss for what else to try or what could be causing this. At first, I thought maybe it was just my 'W' key since I use it so much, but when I remapped my controls to less frequent keys, the exact same thing happened. It seems unlikely that so many keys would fail all at once, especially since the mouse is practically brand new.
I'm looking for some recommendations for a monitor with roughly these specs:
- 27 inches - QHD - 120Hz or higher - I need a stand that isn't too deep since my desk is only about 24 inches - Ideally height-adjustable - Mostly using it for office work—nothing heavy, no photo editing or anything like that - Some occasional gaming, so I'd definitely prefer a decent refresh rate when I do jump on - Budget is around $833, maybe a little more if it's worth it
I bumped up my pagefile size, and honestly, that fixed a huge chunk of the issues right away. I also grabbed another 8GB of RAM, so I’m finally running 16GB in dual channel instead of just 8GB in single channel (that actually dropped my CPU usage from hitting 90-100% down to around 70-80%). Everything feels smooth now performance-wise—no more frame drops. My GPU was always holding its max frequency, so that wasn't really the issue, but now the usage stays pretty much pinned at 100%, which wasn't happening before I tweaked the pagefile and added the extra RAM. The wattage is still fluctuating like it was before, though. I'm honestly stumped on why that's happening since every other metric shows everything is running exactly as it should. VRAM usage is sitting around 3-3.5GB in Battlefield 1, which seems totally normal. I haven't bothered testing a different power supply since things are working fine now, so I'm guessing those wattage readings are just being wonky.
It’s probably not the CPU since it's sitting at 85-95%, and from what I've seen, better cards don't run into this issue in Battlefield 1, so I doubt that's the culprit. I'm going to borrow a power supply to test that out. Honestly, I don't get why the usage drops all the way to 0; it shouldn't be dipping at all, let alone hitting zero, if you ask me. I even tried bumping up the resolution scale to put more pressure on the graphics card itself, but nothing works—no matter how much work there actually is to do, the usage just randomly tanks. On top of that, the longer I play, the worse it gets. After about 20 or 30 minutes, my FPS drops down to the 50-60 range, when it really should be staying above 80. We aren't talking about losing a few frames because someone might have slightly overclocked something; this is a 20-frame difference, and it happens whether I'm playing on Low or Ultra. Temperatures aren't the issue either, they stay around 70 degrees. My motherboard is an ASUS Prime B360M-A and the slot is running at x16 3.0.
Honestly, I’m just looking at my in-game performance right now. I wouldn't even bother checking wattage or anything else if it wasn't acting up this badly. For some reason, it's just not performing the way it should. Looking at any video or benchmark online, I haven't seen anyone else's FPS dipping below 60 like mine does. It really should be staying at least around 85, but I'm stuck in the 70-75 range with constant drops below that, even on the exact same maps and settings. When I toggle VSync to 60 FPS, it actually dips below 50; if it could at least hold a steady 60, I wouldn't complain so much. And it doesn't matter what settings I throw at it—whether I'm on Low or Ultra, the performance is practically identical. Also, while everyone else seems to have their usage pinned at 99-100% constantly, mine randomly drops to 0% right in the middle of a session before slowly climbing back up. How is it even possible for usage to tank to 0% during heavy load? Naturally, the FPS follows suit. It doesn't even matter what's happening on screen—I'll be in the middle of an explosion with 90 FPS, and then suddenly in an empty field, it drops to 55 just because the card decided that's what it wants to do.
There are plenty of videos out there showing cards like this pulling a steady 170-200W without budging an inch while usage hits 100%, regardless of which game you're playing. When you look at the individual readings for the chip and everything else, it’s the same story—nothing even breaks 130W, and even hitting that is rare. Most of the time I'm seeing around 100W, and it just fluctuates constantly; you can literally see the usage and FPS tank whenever the wattage drops. If it were just running steadily at 130W while pegged at 100% usage, I'd think it was fine, but it keeps dipping below 100W. There's just no consistency at all.
I tried bumping the Power limit up by 50%, but honestly, it didn't make a bit of difference—everything stayed exactly the same. I've got High Performance enabled too. I poked around in the BIOS as well, but I couldn't find anything useful worth changing.
Honestly, I’d expect it to just shut down completely or trigger a blue screen. I'm going to borrow a unit from a friend to test it out. If the power supply isn't the culprit, then I'm honestly stumped.
Larry Ortiz5 said:Have you tried testing this with a different game yet? Also, what kind of software are you using to track things like your GPU or CPU usage? By the way, I thought that card had 8GB GDDR5 of VRAM, not 12!?
I've tested it with other games, but this issue with Windows seems to pop up everywhere, if it's even an actual problem. I'm not sure if it's possible for the card to hit its max frequency if it isn't getting enough power, or if it can even run at all without the PC shutting down or hitting a BSOD. Basically, it hits about 130W in any game I play. I can't tell if it's actually affecting performance; the FPS feels fine, though there are occasionally some bigger drops than I'd expect from this card, but nothing that makes it unplayable.
As for the VRAM, I was looking at HWInfo and realized I might have misread the numbers. There's GPU Memory Usage and then there's GPU D3D Memory Dedicated. That Usage number jumps around quite a bit, but the Dedicated part stays around 3.5 GB in Battlefield 1, which is exactly what I expected. MSI Afterburner shows 3.5 GB as well. So, I probably just misread it originally—it seemed weird that it could go up to 12, but I figured maybe it was doing something like using the pagefile to pull memory from somewhere else.
Honestly, I'm more concerned about the power supply side of things, especially since I see this card pulling up to 180W under load elsewhere, and I don't know what could possibly be a heavier load than Battlefield 1 on Ultra settings. I even tried setting the Power limit to 10-20% and then up to 50%, but nothing really changes.
So, I recently picked up a new EVGA GeForce RTX 3060, and you can check out the previous discussion on this thread here: Topic. That said, I've run into two specific issues while playing Battlefield 1. My current setup uses a Core i5-8400 and 8 GB of single-channel DDR4 RAM running at 2666 MHz.
The first issue is that my VRAM usage hits the ceiling—sometimes it even shows weirdly high numbers like 12 GB. To make matters worse, once I close the game, the VRAM doesn't clear out; it just sits there stuck at 5, 6, or 7 GB even when I'm doing absolutely nothing on my PC. It stays like that until I give the whole system a restart.
The second thing is the power draw. I'm seeing the card pull a maximum of about 130 W under full load, though it usually hovers around 100 W. Looking at the specs for this card, that feels a bit low to me, and I'm wondering if that might be why my performance isn't quite where it should be. For context, I'm using an EVGA 500 W1 power supply that's about three years old. I'm using a 6+2 pin cable for the GPU, but those extra 2 pins are sitting empty even though the PSU has an 8-pin connector. Is it possible that this specific cable configuration isn't delivering enough wattage, or could the entire power supply be the culprit?
The game is actually pretty playable most of the time, at least until that VRAM spike hits, which causes my frame rate to tank down to the 40-50 FPS range. Even when things are stable, I feel like I'm missing about 10-20 FPS compared to what I see in benchmarks and on YouTube.
Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Motherboard: ASUS M5A97 Le R2 CPU: AMD FX-6300 3.5 GHz HDD: WD Green 500GB SSD: Kingston 256 GB GPU: XFX HD 7850 2GB RAM: DDR3 Kingston 8 GB (2x4GB) 1600 MHz PSU: Thermaltake Smart SE 520W Case: Just some basic generic case, not counting that in the price CD/DVD: Just a standard drive
Everything is about 4 years old, except for the power supply which is 3 years old, and the SSD is just under 2 years old.
I'm looking for a valuation on the whole setup, but I'm especially curious what I could get for the CPU, motherboard, and GPU combined. I might just do an upgrade instead, since the rest of the parts are mostly fine.
I honestly can't say for sure—there were a few other complications popping up, so I wasn't paying too much attention to that specific part. I might be able to push it up to 4.2GHz if I bump the voltage just a little bit more, though. I can give it a shot.
Yeah, I’ve overclocked it a bit; it's sitting at 3.5 GHz on stock settings. I wouldn't push it past 4 GHz though—between the motherboard and the cooler, I feel like I'm already pushing the limits. It seems to run pretty hot during long sessions, and I think I'm seeing some thermal throttling, or at least that's my impression. As for gaming, I mostly play Call of Duty—specifically the fourth one right now—and once the new one drops, that'll be next in line to replace it. Aside from that, I play some EA Sports, which runs perfectly fine even now. I dabble in a few other things here and there, but nothing heavy enough to really worry about.
What kind of GPU would you guys recommend as an upgrade for this setup:
XFX HD 7850 2GB, AMD FX-6300 overclocked to 4 GHz
My budget is somewhere between $150 and $667, depending on what I get for my money. Also, what’s the absolute limit for a graphics card with this CPU before I start hitting a major bottleneck?
I picked this up for $183 at Best Buy back in November, so I can't really go any lower on the price. Honestly, my main concern was just whether it was still worth grabbing since it’s an older model—but hey, it's >, so I figured even if it's a bit dated, it'd probably outshine some of those newer, budget brands selling for over $500-$200... thanks for the input!
I don't want to clutter things up with a whole new thread, so I'll keep this quick. I'm looking at picking up a used SSD Intel 520 Series 120 which is priced at $133. Is it actually worth the cash considering the model is technically discontinued? This specific one is pretty recent though—it was bought less than six months ago, so it still has over 4 years of warranty left. I'm wondering how much better the newer models really are compared to this one, if there's a massive performance gap, and if you think it'll still hold up fine for the next few years.