Drastic framerate loss out of no where.

Airek

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Jan 23, 2007
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Hey folks,

So about a month ago I was playing TF2 and had bad framerate. Annoyed, I restarted my computer. Usually the fix all, right? ;) Well of course I was disappointed when I got back into the game only to have bad frames still. I decided to go back to TF2 later on to try and solve the problem. I loaded up Titan Quest to pass the time and was very upset when I had problems even playing TQ. From there I tried many different games only to have the same problem. This all happened at a bad time I was ending my military career and getting ready for a cross country move. Now that the move is done, I turned my computer on hoping it magically got fixed. It didn't. Time to tackle the problem.

So what have I done so far?

Checked all power connections.
Reseated my memory and moved to new slots.
Run anti-virus and spyware programs.
Defragmented, CChecked.
Cleaned all hardward with compressed air.
Overclocked GPU very minimally.

Result? Absolutely nothing. I played CoD4 single player a few months ago at 1680x1050 and 4x anti-aliasing and most settings on high with absolutely no problems. Now I run everything on low/off and still hit around 7 frames with an average of about 10-17.

My setup:

Windows XP
2GB Ram
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600
Geforce 8800GTS 640MB
SeaGate Barracuda 320GB SATA HD
Gigabyte 965P-DS3

At this point I'm thinking of a clean install of Windows. I'm running out of ideas. Give me yours!

Thanks.
 

Airek

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Jan 23, 2007
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Forgot to mention that. Yes, I've uninstalled old drivers, ran a driver cleaner, and installed the latest nVidia release. Also tried the same thing with my last working drivers.

I want to do a new install of Windows, but I don't have my Windows XP CD with me... it's in my luggage being sent to my forward location. Trying to figure this out for now without doing that, but I'm out of ideas.
 

smalltime0

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Apr 29, 2008
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Pretty good machine there...

A reinstall of the OS will probably fix the problem. It may be some corrupted files that are on bad sectors.
It is possible that your facing a dieing HDD, My 200 GB IDE HDD (granted its nearing its 4th birthday) has been through alot of bad treatment, especially being balanced in the Floppy dirve bay in my old Sonata case, being subjucated to 50C+ in my old machine, and is on its way out (so sad). Reinstalling the OS did help, but in my case it is delaying the inevitable.
In your case I seriously doubt its suffered that badly, maybe a couple of corrupted files.
 
I know what I'm gonna say is the last probability that you perhaps are gonna encounter.
I have experienced something like that about 4-7 years ago with my FX5200.
The frame rate was goin' down all of a sudden.
The cause was the VGA self. I have OC'ed it without paying attention to the temperatur.
But bad HDD is also possible.