Games get choppy after a few minutes

Hey folks. Although I do play some on occasion, for the most part I'm a rookie when it comes to video games, so forgive me if I'm a little lost here. I'm running an Asus N61V laptop with 4GB of DDR3 RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce GT 240M Cuda 1GB GPU. Whenever I play games (most recently Fallout NV and Homefront, but it happens with all games) they start out running smooth as silk, then after about 3 - 5 minutes of gameplay they get so choppy that I can't even play anymore. If I shut down the game and start it again, 99 times out of a 100 it's good again for another 3-5 minutes, then gets choppy again until I shut down the game and restart again. Any ideas?

 

2 things instantly spring to mind.

1: Are your graphics drivers etc up to date?
2: Is your laptop getting hot? (sitting a laptop on your lap especially when gaming will heat it up and cause the GPU to suffer.

To test your temps download "Speccy" from this site and check temps before gaming and after it gets choppy.

 

All my drivers are up to date. As far as temp goes, before game play I had CPU - 46 deg MoBo 48 deg HDD 31 deg. After 30 minutes of gameplay (20 of it choppy as shi*) I had CPU 55 deg MoBo 58 deg HDD 30 deg. Another interesting thing, the 'HOMEFRONT' process in the task manager is clocking at 762,168 K.

 

Is your DirectX up to date as well? And not just Dx 11, Dx 10 and Dx9 may need to be updated as well? Depressingly many game developers have stayed with Dx9, and even though 10 is supposed to be backwards compatible, backwards compatibility only goes so far.

 

DirectX is all updated and good to go

 

You may have to turn down your graphics settings. Try lowering down your resolution.