We're going with the idea it could be this card - so hoping to try the 2070 in the machine with the 3070 in the next couple of days and we'll see if that helps, I'm not optimistic though.


Re: BIOS - Most settings are already set to default, the only tweaks have been to disable the internal graphics device, and set an XMP profile for the RAM.

Re: x16 slot - yeah, it's sat in the first slot and is receiving the correct amount of bandwith. The GPU has no performance issues at all for any gaming that I do or anything else, it's only vMix where I'm getting strange results.

Happy holidays all - I come bearing an update.

So, we exhaustively tested three different test benches.

My main machine: i7-9700k & RTX 2070
Test bench: Ryzen Threadripper 3960x & RTX 3070
New machine: i9-10920x & RTX 2070


We discovered that in the main machine build, the GPU wasn't being utilised properly. We put the same GPU into the Ryzen build, and it would get 30%+ usage compared to when it was sat in the i7 build.

Swapping out the i7 for the i9 & a new mobo, ran the test again with the 2070, and ended up seeing the same result as the i7 - the CPU would be getting loaded to about 30%, but the GPU only hitting 10%. What was important here is that we didn't reformat/reinstall windows at first with the i9 build, so still had the same OS as the i7 build.


What did the trick was re-installing windows. Once we'd done this and ran the test again, the i9 was sat at 30% usage, but the GPU was now also hitting that 30% usage mark.


I've conducted further tests since with the i7 build (it's now in a different machine, with a GTX 960). Running the same preset on it now yields a 75% CPU usage and a 40% GPU usage.


The 'too long didn't read' is basically there was an issue with Windows. Either some setting, software or some config somewhere was stopping the i7 build from utilising the 2070 properly (all drivers had been properly checked, including chipset/GPU, BIOS had been updated & reset, all of this achieved nothing - only reformatting windows solved it!)



I am now sat on an i9-10920x build regardless because I needed a CPU with more PCIE lanes for utilising capture cards etc, but I'm glad I was able to get to the bottom of the issues with the i7, as it'll now be used as a secondary machine for encoding/streaming/whatever else.


Thanks for the help all :)