If you just bought a new computer, hooked everything up, booted up the system, launched your favorite game, and realized that it was running very slowly, you may have made an honest mistake that many new PC gamers make.
You may have connected the monitor cable to the wrong port.
The most common mistake that many new PC gamers make, due to which games that run slowly or doesn't start at all, it shuts up monitor cable to the wrong port. To find out if this is the case with your computer, just check the back panel of it.
You should see something similar to the photo below. At the top we have some ports. USB ports, a couple of video ports, as well as two RJ-45 (Ethernet) ports (some boards have one), some audio jacks, and maybe some other jacks. These are all the ports on your motherboard. Under the motherboard you should see a set of video outputs, usually DisplayPort and HDMI. These are the ports on your video card.
The monitor cable must be connected to one of the dedicated ports on the GPU. If it's not and it's connected to a port on the motherboard instead, that's probably why your computer is running slow. Since the cable is connected to the motherboard, the computer uses CPU resources. integrated graphics instead of your graphics card, which is much slower and in most cases cannot run even low-demanding 2D games well.
What you need to do is turn off your computer, disconnect the cable from the motherboard and connect it to one of the video card ports.
Just check which port your monitor cable ends in (HDMI or DisplayPort) and then connect it to the corresponding port on your graphics card. That's it!
There are other potential reasons why your computer is running slow.
If your monitor cable was connected to the GPU to begin with, there are other issues that could cause games to run slow on your PC.
Your CPU may be overheating
The second most common issue causing poor gaming performance on new PCs is a processor that thermal throttlingwhich can cause it to run much slower than it should.
CPU thermal throttling can have several causes. A common problem is that you or the person who built the computer forgets to remove the plastic sticker covering the bottom of the CPU cooler, which is in contact with the processor.
To check if your processor is using thermal throttling, download a system monitoring app such as HVINFOas well as a CPU testing tool such as Cinebench. Install and open HWiNFO and scroll down until you see the section that shows CPU temperature information.
Now launch Cinebench and run the multi-core CPU test.
Monitor the CPU temperature during the test. If the temperature quickly reaches 100°C, your processor is in throttling mode. This may be due to the sticker not being removed or other reasons.
For example, the CPU cooler may not be installed correctly, resulting in less than ideal contact with the CPU, which can also lead to thermal throttling. There is also a small chance that too little thermal paste was applied to the surface of the processor. Finally, the CPU cooler may not be powerful enough to curb the CPU.
In any case, you should either remove the CPU cooler yourself and check if the plastic sticker has been removed, or reinstall the cooler. Alternatively, you can call the store or manufacturer from whom you purchased your computer and arrange for pickup or a technician visit. You can also take the computer back to the store yourself.
Your RAM may be installed incorrectly.
Not having enough RAM may cause games to perform very poorly. One moment the game you are playing may be running perfectly, and the next moment it may start freezing constantly because there is not enough memory to load the game resources as you move around the game world.
If your computer has two memory cards, one of them may not be installed correctly, causing the computer to only recognize half of your memory. If your PC has 32GB of RAM or more, an incorrectly installed single stick of memory shouldn't cause games to run slowly, as 16GB of RAM is more than enough for most games. But if you only have 16GB of RAM, it's worth checking if your RAM is installed correctly.
You can check if both memory cards are installed correctly in Task Manager. To open the application, right-click an empty space on the taskbar and select Task Manager.
Select the “Performance” menu and then go to the “Memory” tab. If the total memory capacity does not match your PC's specifications, one of the sticks may be installed incorrectly.
You can reinstall it yourself if you know how, or contact the company you purchased the computer from if you don't feel comfortable doing so or don't want to void your warranty. Below you can see a step-by-step guide to reinstalling RAM, courtesy of the META PCs YouTube channel.
Your Internet connection may be unstable
If single-player games work fine, but you have problems with multiplayer games, your Internet connection may be to blame. More precisely, the connection between your computer and the router may be unstable.
You can check this by looking at your ping in multiplayer games you play, or by using an online ping test such as the one available on the ping test site. Anything over 100 milliseconds (ms) can cause noticeable latency spikes. A ping of 200ms or higher will likely cause significant lag and stuttering, and can make the game completely unplayable.
If you are connected to your router wirelessly, the best way to improve the quality of your connection is to switch to a wired Ethernet connection. If this is not possible, there are several ways improve the quality of your wireless connection.
While these are the most common reasons why games run slowly on your new PC, the list of potential problems is much longer. For example, there is a small chance that your SSD is faultywhich may allow you to use Windows, but may have negative consequences when running resource-intensive programs, including games.
Poor gaming performance can also be due to GPU driver issues. You can fix this updating graphics drivers. If this does not solve the problem, you should clean install of GPU drivers. If your computer was working fine, but after updating Windows began to slow down, you can try to speed up.
