What's wrong with my gaming rig? Please help!

[rebpc23]

I got my new gaming computer built about 4 months ago. I bought a Saphire Radeon HD 7850 2gb video card (I also have 8gb of speedy ram and an IvyBridge i5 3450) that came with a free Far Cry 3 download. Far Cry 3 ran very well at high settings, almost no fps dips or choppiness. 2 weeks later after finishing a second playthrough I noticed the game became very choppy, even on medium or low settings. I tried other less demanding games like Serious Sam 3, Fallout New Vegas and even Oblivion and they all have either constant, or occasional (every few seconds to every minute) fps drops of 5-20 frames. So far I have ran full virus scans with malwarebytes and avast, messed around with all the settings in each game and nothing seems to fix this. I have defragged it about 1-2 months ago and am going to run another defrag now. If you have any suggestions I'd love to hear them, I'd rather not have to take it to a repair store. Thanks. (Id also like to point out I have all my unnecessary background programs closed)

 

[Cyanide Reverse]

was there any driver updates that could be the problem?

 

[rebpc23]

was there any driver updates that could be the problem?

Possibly, I did update it recently but the problem began a long time before that. Like oblivion doesn't run smooth on this thing and it's driving me crazy.

 

[Hazzacanary]

have you checked task manager whilst gaming for another process which could be eating up all your processing power? could be anitvirus or something clogging up the cpu and bottlenecking it.

 

[rebpc23]

have you checked task manager whilst gaming for another process which could be eating up all your processing power? could be anitvirus or something clogging up the cpu and bottlenecking it.

No, but at idle im using 0% cpu and 1.13GB of memory with my antivirus on.

 

[Cyanide Reverse]

Do a virus scan just in case it's the viruses which are causing you trouble.