FPS has dropped on all games on my custom build

[MattP598]

A little over 2 years ago I built my first gaming rig. My specs were...

nVidia nForce 680i motherboard
Core 2 Duo E6850 3.0ghz OC'd to 3.8ghz
4 gigs RAM
320 GB Seagate 7200RPM HDD
EVGA GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB graphics card
Rosewill 650W PSU
Windows XP 32-bit

Everything went well, I was able to run everything I put in it maxed out except for Crysis and I only had to turn the resolution down a little to run it. Call of Duty, Bioshock, Mass Effect, FEAR, Oblivion, etc. ran perfectly.

Well I moved to a rural area for awhile without high speed internet and kind of quit playing PC games for about a year. I did, however, add an 80GB HDD to the machine for some extra storage, and then added another 640GB HDD later and dual booted Windows 7 Ultimate on it.

Well, Modern Warfare 2 comes out so I buy it and install it on the XP partition and crank up the resolution, AA, etc. The game was almost unplayable like a slideshow. So I turn AA off and turn down the rez and now I can play it but it still stutters during some parts. So I tried some old games like Bioshock, Modern Warfare 1, and FEAR and they all are the same way. The only thing that has changed on my setup is I have added a couple of HDDs so I thought maybe it was my PSU, but I have used a couple of PSU calculators online and they all say that my 650W PSU should be fine.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Like I said this is my first build and I am tech savy enough to build one but I haven't had a lot of experiences troubleshooting issues like this. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[13thmonkey]

dust clogging the fan, 8800's run hot and so might throttle (i'd expect artifacts not stuttering though)

Can you run rivatuner in the background and check cpu and gpu temps, along with frame rate?

Is the card seated properly? are you seeing all of your RAM, stuttering sounds more like a RAM problem, but should have plenty.

power should be fine, my Q9550 with 5hdd and a 8800GTX + 2 monitors pulls about 330W from the wall when gaming.

What does oblivion play like?

 

[MattP598]

Thanks for the suggestions. I am at work right now so when I get home I will check the fans and temps. I will try reseating the memory and GPU as well. I'm not sure about Oblivion because I sold it awhile back before I started having the problems. The main ones I have tried are Modern Warfare 1 & 2, Bioshock, & Crysis. They are all unplayable now on max settings. I have a fan on top of the case, 2 on the side, one in front, and one in back. The one on top and one of the ones on the side I noticed the other day were not running any more.

How does rivatuner work? I have never used it. Do you just run it in the background while you are playing a game?

 

[13thmonkey]

you can get it to log temps, if you select customise and hardware monitoring, it'll let you monitor in background, i'm going to try crysis now at 16x10, and see what it plays like, its the only common game.

 

[MattP598]

I will try rivatune as well when I get home. Thanks for your help.

 

[13thmonkey]

alright, at 16x10 getting low 20's with very high no AA just about playable with 4AA. dropped to high settings and no AA and got high 20's low 30's.

There's a rivatuner demo on youtube...

 

[andy_93]

You say that you are dual booting,was you dual booting before these problems started?.Try installing on the Windows 7 partition and see if you get the same results,if the games were running fine before,but you`ve since started dual booting then your problems could lie there.

 

[MattP598]

Well, I get home today to try out some of these suggestions and now I can't boot in to XP. It keeps rebooting after the splash screen. So I've spent this afternoon trying to fix that. Everything I have read says it is probably a virus or spyware.

Yea the problems started happening before I dual booted. That was one of the reasons I decided to try Windows 7. I installed Modern Warfare 2 on Windows 7 and it runs about the same, maybe a little bit better. Crysis, however, is like a slide show on Windows 7 even on average to low settings. It could be a driver issue with Windows 7 since Crysis is an older game.

I'm thinking I may just try and recover the files I want to keep off of XP then just do a clean install of Windows 7, get rid of XP, try reseating my GPU and memory, check all the power cables, and then check the temps and see where that gets me.

 

[13thmonkey]

fyi i'm running crysis on win 7 64bit, using the latest drivers from nvidia (as of about 6 weeks ago) so its not an inherent problem, if that helps.