Unknown 50% drop in gaming performance in Vista 64

[Zantetsuken]

First of all, hello everyone! I'm not native English, so please apologize any lack of English knowledge, or any errors in the following report.

Well, this is my current problem.
I've installed Vista 64-bit in my computer (Athlon X2 4200+, MSI K9N-Neo V3, GeForce 9800GT 512MB, 4 GB OCZ Platinum 800 MHz Ram, and two SATA hard-drives), and after some days of tweaking, I've got it up and running very smoothly.
I've been playing games like The Last Remnant, World of Warcraft, Wheelman, HAWX and GRID withouth any problem, up until April the 9th, when I removed an IDE Hard-disk that I had for another person (changed it for a good 500gb SATA) and reconnected the Sata cables.

I went out for the holiday, and when I came back and tried to play today, April the 13th, the games mentioned before score almost half the FPS they used to provide. Some of them became unplayable at that rate, and I cannot believe how such a drop could exist, if I haven't touched any driver settings or else.

I'm an advanced user, been fixing machines for years now, but this one problem totally beat me, as I'm new to Vista OS (been using XP).

I'd be extremely thankful for any assistance in this matter. Lemme know if I should provide any additional information.

 

[zxe_the_sage]

i had the same problem, its got to do with the way vista (and windows 7) do the caching on sata drive vs ide ones, you need to go to device manger and turn it off under the policies tab and give the pc a good restart.

thats what helped for me in any case hope it helps

 

[Zantetsuken]

Well, after many hours of guesswork, I was able to find the answer to my problem.

It wasn't the caching of disk drives, after a while I found out that, when I closed my case after removing the old IDE drive, one cable was literally blocking the CPU's cooler fan. The CPU wasn't getting enough cooling, so it was slowing things down.

Fortunately no damage was done to the CPU, though I guess I might have taken off some years of it's lifetime...

I cannot believe I didn't checked that out when I closed the case...

Thanks for reading, and for posting!