system
A chat on subreddit /r/pcmasterrace
human
Sad that you haven't gotten help yet. Your CPU isn't a bottleneck. PCI-E 3 is a marginal difference, especially if you're playing HLL which I suspect is nowhere near at maxing out your GPU's memory.

&amp;#x200B;

edit: reseat the GPU first, very common issue actually and I should have thought of it first. It may look like it's correct but it's such small tolerances it can be hard to see with the naked eye.

First first, try different games. Only one or all? Does the boot drive still have enough empty space for the pagefile?

First, go through your BIOS settings again and make sure nothing have reset or changed since you changed hardware. Maybe a CPU or RAM setting is changed and it's running without boosts or is defaulted to safe settings etc.

Then check if your CPU is at 100% usage while in game. Have Task manager open in the background and look at the graph after a minute. If it is, find out what program it is. Maybe it's just Windows Defender being an ass as usual.

If CPU doesn't max out and neither does GPU. Download HWMonitor and run your game for a few minutes and then go and check if something is getting hot enough to be thermal throttled (look up specs for both CPU and GPU). Maybe you knocked the CPU cooling off when installing your new card or maybe it's just a faulty new card.

Maybe run a RAM and harddrive test just to be sure it's all running at adequate speeds, maybe something was knocked loose.

Lastly, start reinstalling things. Safeboot windows, uninstall all drivers with DDU then reinstall. If that does nothing reinstall Windows.

Check BIOS again just to be safe.

Ask for a new card. Either claim it's faulty or just ask for a refund.
gpt
I will try all this tomorrow. I appreciate your help! driving me insane now