8350 FX + GTX 660ti, dropping to 25-35 fps at times, need advice

[xxaimpiratexx]

Title says it all, I rebuilt my system back in January, and it seems to do OK except for a few issues...

I've noticed in Guild Wars 2, the recommended settings is at all ultra, but for some reason I'll move around and at random angles my fps will literally drop to 20-30...noticeably bad, only in some areas. Also in WoW, I see an average of 25-40 FPS in Orgrimmar on an extremely populated server. This is with distance settings set to "high" instead of ultra. Also in raids the fps will drop pretty low as well. I suspect the stock CPU cooler might be the issue, I haven't been monitoring many temps since I haven't overclocked my system yet.

I did have an issue with my asus motherboard on "performance mode" actually crashing my computer to the BSOD a few times because it "smart-overclocked" it to 4.8 GHZ without reading any temperatures or having any kind of a fail-safe system. Hopefully it didn't partially damage my processor. That issue is corrected now.

Anyway here's the parts list:
Corsair GS700 PSU
Asus M5A97 Motherboard
AMD FX 8350 Processor with stock cooler
EVGA Nvidia GTX 660ti Graphics
8 GB Gskill DDR3 1600 Memory
Western Digital 1TB Caviar HD
Thermaltake case

Just seems to be when there's a heavy workload thrown at it in a short amount of time (like from nothing to a ton of people casting spells at the same time or something similar), the processor has to studder to catch up, and even then the FPS just seems low. Any suggestions would be helpful.

 

[Kurifox]

Give us some temps back. I understand that you OC'ed it with the stock cooler, bad idea, the stock cooler is quite bad, it makes a lot fo noise and doesnt cool down much.
I would definitly switch that out, check the temps and report back.

 

[logainofhades]

I am not familiar with GW2, but try changing shadows to low and disable SSAO. That should help you a bit. I have issues in highly populated areas as well sometimes. View distance set to ultra isn't doing you any favors either. Idk what Blizzard did with MoP but I had to drop settings a good bit compared to Cata when I ran on ultra all the time.