PC Slowed Down

bananasnipa

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Hello everyone, I have a question about my computer that I'm hoping one of you guys can answer. My PC has recently starting running very slowly and I can barely run games, watch videos or even just stay in the desktop. When I try to play games, I used to get good fps on games such as CS:GO and Arma (good for Arma) and now I'm playing at 70 fps on CS from 144 with triple vsync on and about 10-20 in arma instead of about 30-50. In Desktop everything is slow and stuff tends to freeze up from time to time. When I try to watch a video on Youtube it freezes every second and cuts out audio but keeps coming back. Does anyone know what the problem is? I was thinking I could upgrade to Windows 10 from 8.1 but I'm worried that will just make everything worse. I'll post what I know about my build for everyone and hope that everything I know will be enough. Thanks a bunch :)

Build
Graphics Card- GTX 770 http://www.amazon.com/EVGA-GeForce-SuperClocked-Graphics-02G-P4-2774-KR/dp/B00CZIQXBA
CPU- i7 4790 (I believe) 2.6 ghz
RAM- 8gb RAM (2x4gb)

PS: Sorry thats all I know :(
 
Solution
No worries. Liquid cooling is extremely easy to tell. You'll have a block in the middle of your motherboard with 2 large rubber hoses going to a radiator that has a fan mounted to it. Looks just like in a car. Aircooler will have the fan in the middle of the motherboard attached to a big chunk of aluminum. Either one requires periodic cleaning, most using a can of compressed air. If you do have liquid cooling, its important to blow the dust out of the radiator, the block being the pump, moving the hot liquid through one hose, then the radiator, which needs the airflow supplied by the famous to extract the heat before returning to the pump. If no air gets through the radiator, the liquid stays hot, and so does the cpu. Air cooling works...

Karadjgne

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A i7 4790 is stock 3.6GHz, a 4790k is 4.0GHz, and a 4790s is 3.2GHz. Even the 4790t is 2.7GHz,but none run at 2.6GHz unless set at that speed by bios. Which would account for some fps loss.

This can happen in several ways. Virus's, manually or more commonly overheating. Overheating is usually due to dirty fans and heatsinks not allowing sufficient airflow to cool the heatsink, therefore raising temps to the point where the cpu throttles itself to more manageable speeds and temps.
 

bananasnipa

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Yea my bad, I realize this now that I put 2.6GHz instead of 3.6GHz. And a bit later on after I posted this I found out that my CPU overheated to 75 Celsius (I know that's really bad :l ) and I feel like its because the fans are dusty because I have (regrettably) never dusted/cleaned my PC. Do I just need to dust the case fans? I'm quite sure I have liquid cooling as well so I don't think I would need to dust that. Also I'm really sorry but I'm not very smart when it comes to technology.
 

Karadjgne

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No worries. Liquid cooling is extremely easy to tell. You'll have a block in the middle of your motherboard with 2 large rubber hoses going to a radiator that has a fan mounted to it. Looks just like in a car. Aircooler will have the fan in the middle of the motherboard attached to a big chunk of aluminum. Either one requires periodic cleaning, most using a can of compressed air. If you do have liquid cooling, its important to blow the dust out of the radiator, the block being the pump, moving the hot liquid through one hose, then the radiator, which needs the airflow supplied by the famous to extract the heat before returning to the pump. If no air gets through the radiator, the liquid stays hot, and so does the cpu. Air cooling works the same way, but uses direct contact with the cpu instead of a liquid filled loop.

So yes, periodic cleaning of all fans and heatsinks is necessary. How periodic is determined by how dusty the pc gets in a given time. Some only need it 2x a year, some need it every few weeks.
 
Solution

bananasnipa

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Thx a bunch, I'm going to try to clean it off right now and see if it is working. But could it be that my CPU is overheating causing everything to run like trash? I've defragmented my hard drives, i've used ccleaner, ive used malwarebytes to clean my PC up, ive upgraded to windows 10 (heard there could be a problem with the win 8.1 I have). If you could get back to me again that would be great, thanks a buch :)
 

Karadjgne

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Download a program from piriform.com, same place you get CCleaner. It's called Speccy. It was written for Intel cpu's and so far has been spot on for temps accuracy. You'll be able to see your cpu core temps under load, at idle etc. Or you can use Hwinfo64 or Realtemp which are also good. I use realtemp because it puts a temp directly on my start bar, so I can always see it, and I'll verify with speccy.

Yes, if your cpu gets too hot, it'll throttle back on speed and voltage, thereby slowing the pc down. This goes for your gpu too, you can use msi Afterburner which has the bonus of putting a readout directly into the game, so you can see temps while playing. Keeping the gpu heatsink clean is just as important as keeping the rest of the system clean.

If you live on a dirt road, you'll wash the car more frequently than living off a blacktop road, same with a pc, if it's in a dusty environment it'll need cleaning more frequently than a clean environment. You'll have to check periodically to see if you are due for a cleaning, before slowdowns start to happen.
 

bananasnipa

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Yea I did this yesterday and it was at around 100 celsius. I'm guessing that is over the top high. I think my liquid cooling broke so I am going to see if I can replace this with my old pc's fan after I buy thermal paste today or tomorrow, but I am staying off my computer so I don't cause anything to break from the heat. Also, is it possible for the liquid cooling to not work anymore if thr fan gets really dusty? If so that might be why so I may not need to buy a new fan/cooler. Thanks a bunch again and I'll get back to you once I figure something out. I'm also going to talk to my neighbor who has a job around computers today so hopefully he can help me out.

PS: Sorry about Grammer, spelling and etc. I am on my phone typing this :p
 

Karadjgne

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No worries, I'm a mostly phone user too, so I get autocorrect errors All the time lol.

It's not the fan per se, its the radiator behind it that gets all the dirt dumped on it. Imagine sliding a big piece of cardboard between the fan and the radiator in a car engine, the car will overheat quick. Same thing with dust on the pc radiator, you get no cooling, cpu overheats. If you unscrew the fan from the radiator, you'll probably see a giant dirt donut on the radiator fins. This is what desperately needs cleaning.
 

bananasnipa

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I just bought some thermal paste to put on my old computers fan but the screws won't reach the motherboard :/ I don't want to buy another liquid cooling set because I feel like a fan would come with less problems. I'm just worried that the screws still won't reach to the motherboard. Are there any fans that you think would reach?
 

bananasnipa

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Yea sry, I didn't mean on the fan. Would it be a bad idea to put the pc sideways and not screw in the fan for now until I figure it out? Some one I just talked to said that would be fine. I'd still out the paste on though.