New system's performance continues to slip

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Stryker

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My current setup is as follows:

Cooler Master Ammo 533 (w/2x 120mm Antec Tricools)
485w ATX 2.0 Enermax Noisetaker
ABIT AN8-Ultra
1GB (2x512) PC3200 Crucial Ballistix
Athlon X2 3800+ w/Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro
250GB WD2500KS
XFX 7800GT w/VF-700cu
Creative X-Fi Xtrememusic

I built it around the turn of the year as a replacement for my aging system that wasn't doing my games any justice. It did work well, for a few months, but the system's performance seemed to slip slowly over time until it got to the point where I find myself at now.

Things seem to get worse and worse, and my gaming performance has gotten to the point where I can't even play Counterstrike: Source without the framerates hitching up at least a few times - and on the settings recommended by the game, no less. It used to be that I could play on any server with no fear of the framerate ever slowing down to the point where it would affect me, but now when I'm in any sort of a crowd at all and there are multiple people on-screen, the framerate often drops below 50 and even dips down into the 30s now and then. That's totally unacceptable for the performance to drop like that.

The Windows performance is pretty sluggish as well at times even when loading simple applications such as Creative's media player. While the load times are not entirely unreasonable, I believe that they are slower than the speed system is capable of doing. It takes a fair amount of time to boot up and to shut down, and right after it initially loads Windows if I try to run anything it starts chugging like my venerable Pentium M laptop. I just find it awfully strange that a dual core processor acts like that given that not a whole lot is loaded at startup.

And last night, when I was browsing the internet looking at Antec's case lineup the system suddenly blue-screened and displayed a MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION error. Not knowing what this was, I looked it up and was surprised to learn that, apparently, this means that something is very much wrong with my hardware but I don't have any idea what the problem could be. I've had to send back or replace so many parts over the course of this system's short life that I guess I didn't even consider the possibility that something could be wrong again.

I'm not really sure where to start looking. If it's of any relevance, I also have issues with hooking up USB devices to this computer. It will not recognize any outside USB-capable device such as my LG VX9800 cell phone or my Iriver T10 MP3 player. Other USB devices, however, such as my USB mouse and keyboard, work just fine.

This isn't a case where the usual suspects are to blame. Spyware, viruses, fragmentation, drivers and the like are out of the question as far as those issues go. And despite what my setup might suggest, I really don't do any overclocking anymore and when I did several months ago I never pushed my hardware beyond a mild boost. Assuming the temperature diodes in the system are even remotely accurate, my temperatures are excellent thanks to the case's ample ventilation.

Building a system isn't so bad, but troubleshooting it is a pain in the rear and I'm not yet experienced in doing it. Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated.
 
Which anti-virus is setup on your rig?

Have you been looking at any dangerous websites lately?

Is all your hardware correctly plugged-in and configured?
 
I've got McAfee currently. I get it for free since my dad's medical office has subscribed to it for as long as I can remember.

And I haven't been to any dangerous sites, no. I mostly just browse through the usual tech forums, check the news and check my mail. I look through case manufacturers' web sites quite a bit as well, but I doubt Antec/Thermaltake/Cooler Master/Lian Li have anything malicious on their sites.

When I assembled the system, I took painstakingly long amounts of time making sure everything was set up properly down to the last jumper. As far as I know, every cable's plugged in where it's supposed to be, everything's jumpered the way it should, and everything has the latest drivers up to date.
 
blue screen is pretty rare in new pc's, im totally guessing but if you say your pc is hooked up 100%, then you got a burnt Harddrive, for the sluggishness i dunno maybe powersupply issue with graphics and harddrive...

it is enermax........
 
This isn't a case where the usual suspects are to blame. Spyware, viruses, fragmentation, drivers and the like are out of the question as far as those issues go.

How do you know that for sure? Back up your data and format and reinstall then you will know for sure. It sounds like malware or your PSU is on its way out. Oh and btw mcafee sucks ***! Use avg Its better and free. You have run both adaware se and spybot s&D and your system is clean?
 
If it was another bad power supply, that would royally **** me off. I've already had to RMA THREE non-working NeoHEs before I got disgusted and drove out to the PC club to buy the Noisetaker. But...I'll go buy a power supply tester later today and check that out. Not too sure about the hard drive thing - I think if the hard drive was bad things would be a LOT slower than they are right now. Things as they stand aren't painstaking slow (excluding startup), just fairly slower than what I believe the system is capable of putting out.

I'll try a clean install as well, but the first time I went to install everything it kept freezing and I kept having to start over. Whether or not that happens again, I'll have to see, but it just might be worth a try. For the record, I did run both Adaware and Spybot and the only thing I had was a couple of tracking cookies.

I wasn't aware that McAfee was so, well, "blah". I've been using it for years now and never really ran into any difficulties with it. I do know a few people who use AVG, but what makes it so much better?
 
I will give you a real world example, I fix people's computers and somepeople just don't want a fresh install, (even though I highly recomend it) and 90% of them are running either norton or mcafee. And almost every time I install AVG with in 30 seconds of rebooting it pick's up trojan after trojan and or worms. And this is installed over an already infected machine, do you know how hard it is for an anti virus software to do that? The main reason for this is norton and mcafee are the most popular anti virus's in the world so if you where writing a virus and you couldn't disable norton or mcafee it wouldn't be much of a virus! Its the same reason Mac's and Linux machines are so much more secure they are only 5% of the market. No profit there for spyware/virus writer's

sorry for the book!! lol

Back to your performance concern's You are running a dual core system but if you are running single thread software (games/ windows) then you are only running on what really is a 3000+ amd

Edit - or is the 3800 x2 two 3200+'s I forget.
 
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