ridiculously low frames on CS:GO

All that is done? That took me a while to collaborate.

Different?

alright.. i tried changing the priority on csgo.exe to high and it seemed to do the trick so far. frames stable at low 80s even with "sv" fluctuations

but you know whats weird. i got this game when it came out about a year ago and at the time i had a pretty old video card, a 4870. it ran the game without issues and when the card died on me, i got the 660ti. it ran without issues for a while too.

question: i've read that changing priorities on applications may affect performance of others. im planning on getting a USB mic soon. will the high priority status of the game affect the mic performance?

Performance of other applications can drop if your cpu cannot handle the process given and performance of other applications will degrade and especially with audio and video. Use DPC Latency Checker it will explain what it is and what it monitors on the website.

What settings is CS:GO running at?

I ran CS:GO on my rig and it utilized 90% of the cpu and had poor fps in the range of 80fps on certain maps.