I’m trying to figure out whether the performance dips I’ve been seeing lately are true CPU throttling or something else going on under the hood. My system should be handling modern games easily, Intel i7-12700F, RTX 3080 Ti, and 32GB DDR4 3200MH,z so there’s really no reason it should be choking at 1440p or even mild 4K settings.
But recently, I’ve been dealing with strange frame drops, sudden 0.1% low dips, and moments where GPU usage drops from 95% to 60% while the CPU hits random spikes, especially in titles like Fortnite, Starfield, and Tarkov. It feels like the CPU just briefly slows down or gets overloaded, which made me wonder if throttling is possibly happening.
I ran my build through an online bottleneck calculator and it did show that the CPU can become the limiting factor in extremely CPU-intensive scenes. That’s fair; some engines hammer single-core performance more than the GPU.
But now I’m trying to understand:
If the bottleneck tool shows the CPU is under heavy load, what other issues could be mimicking CPU throttling?
Could it be:
• CPU thermals spiking past 95°C and forcing clock drops?
• Motherboard VRM limits or power plan settings?
• RAM latency or capacity hitting limits and pushing extra work to the CPU?
• Background tasks stealing threads?
• Windows power mode or scheduler balancing oddly?
• NVMe SSD latency spikes causing micro-stutters?
• Certain games just being extremely CPU-bound no matter what?
Anyone with a 12700F or similar hybrid-core CPU deal with this before? What ended up being the actual cause? I’m trying to avoid unnecessary upgrades and figure out whether it’s real throttling, a CPU bottleneck, or something else entirely.