Ridiculously bad FPS on fairly high end PC

Lifestyle and Entertainment Video Gaming
1

Hey!
First of all I’m sorry if this question was already asked, but I couldn’t think of a way of searching for it.

Okay, I’ve been noticing that EVERY single game I play, I get like 10 seconds on extremely smooth performance, but then, like 6 seconds of ridiculously low FPS (like 3 frames per second).

It doesn’t matter if it’s an old game or a new game, it always happens.

My specs: AMD 64X2 5600+ 3.0Ghz
4Gb Ram
512Mb GF9600Gt
Running Win XP Pro 32

Also, it’s not the temperature, as it is around 45°C which is fine.

Plus, it doesn’t seem like it’s the background processes, as I tried creating a fresh user account only for gaming.

Any help would be very… huh… …helpful.

Thanks!

2

-It’s not the games, as it happens on every game, old or new, randomly, even at menus and stuff.

-It’s not the temperature, as it is around 45°C which is fine.

-Not the power supply, I guess. I have a Zippy Emacs GSM-6600P G1 600w PSU.

-Not a background processes issue, nothing is consuming neither RAM or CPU.

For example, with Prototype running, the CPU Usage is around 30% and the Commit Charge around 400 / 5211 M

3

For one that pc is not high end.

What settings are you running the game at? At hgh end with a decent to high res that pc is going to get low fps in newer games.

Have you updated the graphics drivers?

4

Dude I know but for some games I play, it IS high end.

I actually got these spikes playing Freelancer, even Chris Sawyer’s Locomotion and I’m dead serious.

And yes I have all the latest drivers.

5

Do you have an antivirus running? On the flipside, how about malware? Also, Windows tends to swap whether or not you have free RAM. If the HDD is slow, it can cause nasty halting in games. Have you tried disabling the swap file? It might cause instability, but at least it might show you whether or not the halting issue is caused by Windows hammering on your page file.

6

I formatted my PC and no sucess.

It happens in pretty much every game. All of them. From old 2000 games to new 2009 games, same thing happens, which doesn’t show any lack of specs for them.

The temperature is fine under load aswell.
I have the latest nVidia driver for my VGA and the latest DirectX…

Swap file disabled = no sucess

All the obvious reasons have been considered by my, this is just plain weird.

7

Ok you won’t believe how stupid I feel now.
It appears to be indeed an overheat issue. I was really impressed at how the CPU cools down just by switching tasks while playing the game, to check the sensors.
I opened my case and stuck a big fan beside it and voilá! Perfect smooth gaming.

Thanks for all the help!