Choppy games, plenty of horsepower

[BlueStreak]

Just completed some upgrades to my machine over the past couple weeks. I've tried 2 different games; UT3 and Crysis. Both run very choppy. Game settings don't seem to have any effect. From lowest settings to Med-High things are equally choppy. System Specs:

Abit Fatality An9 32X Mobo
4GB Kingston HyperX RAM
250GB SATA drive
EVGA 8800GTS video card
AMD X2 4200 dual core liquid cooled
22" LG widescreen LCD (if it matters)
Vista Ultimate 32 bit

Outside of games everything runs fine (meaning my normal apps and such). No overclocking. Tried different mice (3). Tried 2 different video cards; an 8600gt and the current 8800gts. Changed RAM from Corsair XMS 2 to current Kingston.
Tried different resolutions in both games and they ran equally choppy regardless of low or high resolution. Have latest drivers from Nvidia. Again, tried all game settings from the very lowest to fairly high and it didn't seem to make a difference either way.

I'm finding this very strange and have no idea where to go from here. I appreciate any suggestions!

 

[peterhuang913]

Driver version?

 

[BlueStreak]

for video card? It's 169.25

 

[masteroc]

The problem could be with your PSU, what are you using currently, if its older or isnt powerful enough to supply your system with adequate power during gameplay it could cause choppy fps.

 

[Coach Thorpe]

Yes can we get a PSU Wattage, I would suggest 550w +

Running a 700 watt PSU and running fine on any game I play on this end

 

[Peter.Cort]

while wattaage is important to a degree, the 12v amps are more important. if you have the link to the psu you have then we could a good idea about if that could be an issue.

 

[BlueStreak]

Well PS is certainly something to consider. Mine is 600W. Not sure the make off hand but pretty decent, not generic crap, didn't come with the case.

A bit more info; the chop is very consistent if that makes any sense. I mean you could measure it at so many times per second and I think it would be very consistent. It's maybe 3x per second.

I'm reinstalling everything now including stupid Vista (I have my reasons for using it).

So we'll see what starting with a clean slate does.

 

[jonny_uk]

To rule out hardware have you tried running cod4 or battlefield 2? those games seem to run nicely on most pc's, be it high spec or not so high spec

 

[Twizted_3kgt]

What's your video card temperature in game? Just to eliminate the possibility of it overheating and downclocking. I discovered mine was doing the same thing, as you described, last night. I took the heatsink off of it and there was a half-inch wall of dust between the fan and the heatsink. Temperatures were spiking into the 120*C range when in game, at which point it would downclock until it could cool off. Probably won't apply to you if your hardware hasn't been used for a while.

 

[nOcLuE98]

What's your video card temperature in game? Just to eliminate the possibility of it overheating and downclocking. I discovered mine was doing the same thing, as you described, last night. I took the heatsink off of it and there was a half-inch wall of dust between the fan and the heatsink. Temperatures were spiking into the 120*C range when in game, at which point it would downclock until it could cool off. Probably won't apply to you if your hardware hasn't been used for a while.

what program do you use to measure, and keep graphs of, your temps in game? gpu and others?