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BobulHead

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I built a gaming system in mid-December and it ran with no problems until a couple weeks to a month ago (not sure when it started really.) I was playing City of Villains and noticed that I was experiencing a singnificant drop in framerates after 15 mins of play or so.

This led me to running a couple of tests -

Quitting the game and restarting yielded no change. Rebooting however, brought me right back to where I should be in framerates for 15 mins or so, then it dropped right back down.

I ran 3dmark05 after the slowdown and it yielded a result of 5711. Rebooted and ran the test 5 more times ina row.

Test 1: 8262
Test 2: 8276
Test 3: 5699
Test 4: 5668
Test 5: 5668

Hmmmm. These results made me dig a little bit deeper.

So I downloaded performance Test 6.0 and ran it after the slowdown and then again after reboot. The results were..shocking to say the least. The comparison graph that I exported is just a little too big for me to attach, but CPU performance in 8 different tested catagories was down by 50%, 2D and 3D graphics performance was down 50% and Memory performance was down 50%. Fifty percent?!

So my question for all you people who are more knowledgable than me is: does this sound like a hardware problem or a software problem. Sure stinks of hardware to me, but I'm going to do a complete hard drive wipe and reinstall only windows and a couple of benchmark tools to eliminate software altogether.

Any ideas any of you can give me would be super.

Thanks,

Kev.
 
Sounds like as if the virtual memory drops out, how much system memory do you have? Cos if it is more than a gig, i don't understand that. Also check all your background processes and applications seems as if some might be resource hogs, might even be a virus.

Also check your temperature inside your PC, sounds like their might not be enough cooling for some parts, as the performance drops as temp picks up.

HOpe this helps, a little bit. Good luck, Sherlock.
 
I thought the same thing about the page file, so I disabled it. I have 2 gig of RAM, so didn't figure I really needed it and eliminated it at the first sign of trouble.

As for overheating, that's the other funny thing I noticed. I have temp probes for CPU and GPU. The GPU has a temp sensor on it which I assume is more correct, but they aren't too far off. Even at the hottest, my vid card never got too hot. ~70C at the hottest under full load. And the CPU never got hot at all. But when I started to lose processing power, the temp on the vidcard went down and stayed down.

Also, I don't think overheating would cause a 50% drop in RAM read/write/cache the way it did. I thought overheating for a while too until I saw the performance graph. 5 different RAM tests performing at 50% of peak.

The case has 4 80mm fans and 1 120mm. The 120mm sets right next to the vidcard and pulls out. It seems to be a fairly well cooled case.

It's probably something stupid like a bad power supply...that'll be my next step after a total software wipe.
 
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