Computer Not Performing As Expected

Okay, so hi everyone. I'm a guy who lived in London, UK. I've got a desk trader job for commodities at a hedge fund so I earn a very decent living. I was on the internet looking at how to build a computer. I got several good recommendations and put them together and started to build it.

Now this computer is by no means slow, it is incredibly fast and can run some older games on ultra. However newer ones like BF3 and Skyrim only run on medium/high. Why is this? I paid very good money for these parts which the internet still tells me are top end and will run any game on any setting, guaranteed. I have multiple sources.

Anyways... Can anyone help me out here?

PC Stats

GPU = Nvidia GeForce 580 GTX
CPU = Intel i7 2600k
Motherboard = Asus P67 sabertooth (I think)
12gb of Corsair RAM
Samsung 27 inch monitor (I have many large monitors due to trading, however I shut them off and disconnect them to game. My friend whos a techie said thats probably not the problem...)
2tb hardrive
Wireless internet card
A sound card (I doubt this effects graphics)
Corsair Hydro H80 CPU cooler


I've tried the internet and google so many times but I'm stuck. Please, can anyone help me? :/

 

Welcome to Computer Help Forums, Feeshermon!

Because this is a bit specialized it may take a bit longer for a reply but, rest assured, some will be forthcoming.

 

Haha thanks mate. I don't really care if it takes a while, I just want to know why my very expensive hardware is only performing at mid range specs.

 

Oh I forgot to add. My power supply is corsair 750/850w power supply, I cant remember which.

 

I would agree with you on the fact that the hardware listed there should run Skyrim on the top settings, I emphasis should because nothing is ever 100% certain with computers but do still think it should be running at the top settings.

My first suspect would be graphics drivers, if you go to device manager ("Start" > right click "Computer" > select "Properties" > select "Device Manager") and open up the Display Adapters and right click on your Graphics card and select "Properties" then select the tab labelled "Driver" and tell us your Driver Version & Driver Date.
If the Driver Date is before 21st December then you may want to upgrade to the driver (link below) as Nvidia have included optimizations for Skyrim, they say upto a 25% improvement, and in the driver version from the middle of November there were some Battlefield 3 improvements as well.

Nvidia 290.53 Beta Driver/Windows 7 64bit - http://www.nvidia.co...-driver-uk.html

It shows how often you have to keep on top of driver updates if you want to use a computer for gaming, as computers can't just run any game straight away, it also depends on how the Windows OS talks with the hardware, which is what the drivers are for, so the specific resource requirements are met for each game because obviously each game is coded differently.

The other slight possibility would be the HDD as that is usually the slowest piece of hardware in a computer, but we'll see how the drivers are first.

 

It says the driver version is: 8.17.12.8562

And then it also says the date is: 15/10/2011

About the HDD, thats the hard disk right? On the windows performance thing, everything is like 7.6/7.9 out of 7.9, except for the hard disk transfer rate which is somewhere at 5.9.

 

So the driver is a while out of date, if you haven't already I'd recommend you download and install the driver I linked above.

Yes the HDD is the hard drive, that rating should be fine, I think it would mean it has a 7200rpm speed so should be more than fast enough.

The driver should hoepfully fix the problem.

 

It seemed to have fixed it a great deal. I cn now run bf3 on high settings, not ultra, but its still a lot better than it was.

 

That's good to hear, as for the ultra settings it seems to be for even higher spec computers than your own, from what little I read over here it seems you would need a second graphics card in your computer to get ultra settings to be smooth.

EDIT - forgot to put link in - http://www.giantbomb.com/battlefield-3/61-27006/bf3-ultra-settings-require-2-gtx580s/35-516260/

I would probably have thought the same of Skyrim as well, but at least you've got high settings as I wouldn't have thought there would be a great deal of difference between high and ultra settings, or at least nothing we could see with our own eyes anyway.

 

Actually I have ultra on skyrim and high on battlefield. To be fair battlefield is a horrendous game for graphics and it is literally the nicest looking game on the market... so... Thanks a lot!