So, you are building your first gaming PC and wondering whether you need to buy that expensive motherboard for a better gaming experience.
Before even thinking, you should know:
Can motherboard affect fps?
Well, don’t worry as you will get exactly what you need in this article. I asked this exact same question when I built my first PC.
Now, as a tech expert, I like guiding people who find themselves in situations like yours.
So, what are you waiting for? Grab some coffee, and make sure not to scroll ahead without properly reading everything.
Can A Bad Motherboard Cause Low FPS?
A motherboard cannot affect your gaming experience directly. However, the motherboard may indeed end up indirectly affecting FPS when the motherboard is throttling the CPU due to some kind of thermal issue.
The motherboard’s power limit can also make the CPU throttle. Which eventually costs performance.
One thing to keep in mind here is that the resulting performance in this kind of scenario can be much worse than if you are working with a better motherboard.
Let me show you how motherboards can affect the performance of other components. Suppose you have a motherboard that can support only PCIe 2.0 graphics cards.
If you combine this motherboard with a graphics card with PCIe 3.0 support, you will experience a very noticeable drop in performance. So, you can see that you shouldn’t buy older motherboards if you want to use the latest and greatest graphics cards.
Let me explain with an example. Say you have a motherboard that only can support 2400Mhz RAM. In addition to that, a motherboard cannot provide more fps beyond what it can support.
If you decide to upgrade your ram to one with 3200Mhz, this won’t improve FPS because the motherboard is limited to only 2400Mhz frequency. RAM can affect FPS significantly, nevertheless.
Once you have an excellent motherboard, like a Z or a B model, you can overclock your CPU, which can indirectly make a huge difference to your FPS performance.
Do Motherboard Drivers Affect FPS?
In addition, if you want all your gaming sessions to be buttery smooth, efficient, and stable, you should definitely keep your drivers up-to-date.
Besides, it’s not really difficult to keep your drivers updated nowadays. You can get driver updates for free, and they will even update automatically in the background.
Some premium options provide a better experience, but they are not exactly necessary.
If you are looking for reliable driver software to keep your fps at its very best, here are my best two picks:
- 10bit Driver Booster.
- Driver Reviver.
Do CPUs Affect FPS?
In most cases, having a better CPU will definitely give you an edge when it comes to FPS during gaming. A CPU with more cores will provide better performance for games that utilize them instead of a CPU with fewer cores.
You should remember that this is only a factor only when the game you are playing supports multiple cores. Most modern games will probably support it, but you will still find some that don’t.
If having more cores won’t affect the gaming performance, you need to compare the CPU’s speed.
A CPU with a higher clock rate will be more powerful and faster than a CPU with a lower clock rate.
How to Boost FPS on PC
If you feel you are not getting enough fps from your PC, you should upgrade your graphics card. You can also try upgrading other PC components, but it might be time for some performance optimizations if you already have a good setup. FYI, you can optimize your CPU for gaming.
What do I mean by optimizations? Well, this involves tweaking the software of your PC to favor gaming more than anything else.
I have already talked about the first step: keeping your drivers up-to-date. If you don’t keep your drivers updated, you shouldn’t be worried about seeing stutters and frame drops in your games.
The next step is to optimize the settings in the game. The settings you change entirely depend on the game itself. Let’s say you are playing Tom Clancys: Ghost Recon, and you see that there are many stutters and lags and fps drops.
What do you do? You should try lowering some of the settings like resolution scaling, render distance, and texture quality.
Yes, the game will not look as good as before. You don’t have to worry about fps anymore.
Another option that works is defragmenting your hard drive a couple of times in a month. You don’t have to do this if you are working with an SSD, though.
The next part of optimizing is OS itself to speed up Windows 11 performance. You should clean up all your background applications, especially browsers like Chrome or Firefox, which can take up to 2GB of RAM before you start playing a game, and you will see an immediate improvement.
FAQ
Question: What could cause low FPS?
Answer: Most of the time, users reporting low FPS issues will have a weak graphics card, old graphics drivers, an ancient CPU, or they just won’t have enough RAM. It’s extremely rare to see anyone reporting low FPS due to the motherboard.
Question: Can motherboard cause slow down computer?
Answer: Well, a motherboard does have the potential to become the performance bottleneck itself, especially on an aging system, since it can stop you from upgrading to newer parts, depending on the components you use.
Question: Is it bad to use all CPU cores?
Answer: Well, if you wonder whether your CPU will get damaged, the answer is no. However, I recommend you leave settings to default as Windows will automatically turn on all the cores when needed. Keeping it on at all times will drain power heavily.
Question: Is it better to have more cores or higher GHz for gaming?
Answer: People generally prefer to have higher clock speeds, leading to snappier gaming performance, while multiple cores improve multitasking efficiency. Either way, you should get a CPU with at least two or more cores.
Question: Does RAM increase FPS?
Answer: Yes, typically expanding your RAM size would improve your gaming performance. However, if you already have a good amount of RAM, like 8 GB or 16 GB, you won’t see much difference by adding more RAM since that is enough for most games.
Question: Is Intel or AMD better for gaming?
Answer: Intel is definitely the best for enthusiasts like myself and other professionals, but AMD Ryzen offers so much to customers who like keeping more money in their pockets at an affordable price. In short, if you are someone who likes keeping more money in their pocket than spending it, you should go for Ryzen.
Final Thoughts
When you are gaming, you always need a stable FPS, and to achieve that, any average motherboard will do, as long as you are not mixing it up with incompatible components.
I really hope you were able to learn something from this article and that you can go ahead and make the right purchase decision.
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