It doesn't matter if it's just an extra 5%; no one wants to leave performance on the table when it comes to their gaming PC. Even if everything is working properly, you may not be getting the highest frame rates possible out of your rig, and that's a problem. Thankfully, there are a few quick ways you can tell if something has gone awry in your PC, and a few quick solutions to get it back on track.

4 You barely hear the fans

They don't need to be loud, but they should be working

I'll never knock a quiet gaming PC, but you put fans in your PC for a reason. Components get hot when they're being fully utilized, and your fans need to spin up to keep everything cool. It's not that your PC should sound like a jet engine when you're playing games, but it should be notably louder than when you're just browsing the internet. If you don't hear your fans ramp up at least a little bit, there's a good chance you aren't offering your components the full thermal headroom that they're capable of.

You don't need to blindly guess about fan noise, thankfully. If there's a problem, it'll show up as high temperatures in a tool like HWMonitor (HWInfo has more information, but it's also more difficult to parse). If your components are constantly at or nearing their thermal limit when you're playing games, you need a more aggressive fan curve. Every component is a bit different, but most CPUs and GPUs top out at around 90 to 100 degrees Celsius before they start limiting performance as a safety precaution.

If you want to squeeze the best performance out of your PC with the lowest noise, you should set your own fan curve. There are a ton of ways to do this, but the easiest and most powerful is Fan Control. It gives you access to all the fans in your system, and it allows you to define fan curves based off different sensors. Your CPU fan works based on your CPU temperature, your system fans based on system temperature, and so on.

3 You see inconsistent game performance and micro-stutter

Wild variation is a cause for concern

Game performance is a complex topic, but for most rigs in most games, you should expect largely the same performance each time you play. There's variation, and new drivers or updates can have an impact on your performance. Further, even different areas within the same game can have an impact on performance — towns in Dragon's Dogma 2 and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered are particularly demanding areas, for example. What you mainly want to look out for is wildly inconsistent performance without any clear reason.

If there's a game you're putting a lot of hours into, it can be worth monitoring your performance with a benchmark from time-to-time with a tool like Nvidia's FrameView or CapFrameX. With CapFrameX, in particular, you can dig into the frame times to see where your performance is dropping, as well as zero-in on stutter and micro-stutter. More than anything, using a tool like CapFrameX will allow you to see when performance drops are happening, and maybe provide some hints as to why they're happening.

That's what's tough about troubleshooting inconsistent performance on your gaming PC; it can be the result of so many different factors. Some of the first places to look are your GPU drivers and any Windows updates, followed by new BIOS updates and clearing your DirectX cache. There are some games where performance isn't consistent, and more still where poor optimization leads to poor performance overall. But if you're seeing wildly variable performance across your games, there's a problem with your gaming PC.

2 Your GPU isn't being fully utilized

It's the main driver of gaming performance

I like to have a performance overlay open while I'm playing games to spot any performance issues, and one of the easiest signs that your gaming PC isn't running at its maximum potential is when your GPU isn't being fully utilized. There isn't a hard and fast rule for how much GPU utilization games will take — less demanding games obviously require less GPU horsepower — but you should have a GPU utilization of at least 80% in most games you play. If your GPU is frequently below that mark, there's a good chance something is limiting its performance.

Unless you have something like a power limit or fps cap, which can be intentionally limiting factors for efficiency reasons, the main culprit for low GPU utilization in games is a CPU bottleneck. You can deduce a CPU bottleneck by looking at your CPU and GPU utilization — high CPU and low GPU utilization means you're experiencing a bottleneck — but there are some tools that make bottlenecks clearer. Special K, for example, will show you the frame times for both your CPU and GPU. If your CPU is taking longer to produce a frame than your GPU, you have a CPU bottleneck.

Thankfully, you don't need to just buy a new CPU to get around a bottleneck. Although that's the ideal solution, increasing the load on your GPU can balance your performance. There are a few ways to do that, including turning off upscaling like DLSS and turning up your graphics settings. If you have an extreme CPU bottleneck, you can also experiment with things like Nvidia's DLDSR, which allows you to render games above your monitor's native resolution and increase the workload on your GPU.

1 Your CPU is throttling

Hot chips make for bad frames

Particularly on newer, high-end CPUs, temperatures are pushed to the max. That's how modern CPUs are designed, with built-in boost algorithms that take into account thermal headroom to drive your CPU at the highest clock speed possible. If you're frequently hitting that maximum temperature or getting close to it, that means the algorithm will limit your performance until your CPU gets back into a safe temperature range.

Although throttling is mainly an issue in laptops, it can show up on desktops if you pair a powerful CPU with an inadequate cooler. It's an extreme example, but a CPU like the Core i9-14900K can easily outclass a lot of air coolers. When pushed to the max, even all-in-one liquid coolers with a radiator smaller than 360mm can struggle to keep up. There's also the rest of the PC to keep in mind; a small form factor PC with a single case fan is going to run hotter than a full tower with half a dozen.

Better cooling is the ideal solution, but there are some things you can do to help a hot CPU without spending money. Undervolting has become increasingly popular over the past few generations, and for good reason. In order to maintain high clock speeds, most CPUs come with a very conservative voltage curve from the factory, and running at a lower voltage allows you to maintain your performance at lower temperatures.

You can also experiment with downclocking or power-limiting your CPU. That will reduce your performance overall, but it might help with consistency if you're running into a thermal wall. The boosting algorithms tend to be very aggressive once you hit the thermal ceiling, which manifests as a sudden, severe drop in performance for a brief period of time before returning to normal. A slight power or clock limit will help keep you from that thermal ceiling. You might see slightly lower performance overall, but at least it'll be consistent.