Gaming Problems...

Well, i recently built a gaming computer on a limited budget, about $600-$700. When i play games (WoW, CS:S, and BF2) I start out with good fps. After about 15-20 minutes, sometimes less, my fps drops drastically and the game becomes difficult to play (not unplayable though). Although I thought it was a heating issue in the beginning, I checked the processor temps and found that SuperStep was registering the temperature at 40 degrees C.

I have the latest BIOS, forceware drivers, sound drivers, and windows updates.
I have a P4 3.0ghz, Foxconn mobo (forgot the precise model), a WD 120GB HD, nVidia GeForce FX 6600 256MB DDR, and 2GB of corsair RAM (pc133).

Nothing is OCed and the video card is new.

 

Does this include the temperature of your graphics card?
If not then download everest from here and report back the temperature of your graphics card before playing and when your fps drop.

Are the games you play online? I know CS:S is but not sure about BF2 and WoW, does it happen only when you play online or does it happen when you play offline aswell?

 

i couldnt find a temperature for my GPU, but the reason that i thought that it wasn't temperature was because the games are still somewhat slower than normal even after i clsoe and reopen them (with a 10 minute period in-between) but i attatched an EVEREST report which will most likely help out a bit more...

 

couple of things i saw may cause problems
for 1one your 12v rail was showing 9v your system may be under powered if its a power supply that came with the case you should check into replacing it. also youve got a stick of pc3200 and a stick of 2100 ram not sure how the sis chipset handles that, do you have anything in the pci slot immediately below the agp slot? I'm not positive but i believe thats referred to as pci 1 and its populated this may cause errors with an agp card installed since i believe (but find out from the more experienced techies on the site )they share an irq or buss something along those lines hope that helps

 

Structured sentences are your friend.

 

thanks, i'll look into that, but Im not much for voltages and such, so what do you mean when you talk about the 12 volt rail? My power supply didn't come with my case, there isn't anything currently in the pci slot underneath the AGP slot... but my question is, if my system was underpowered, wouldn't that cause a problem the whole time the computer was running? And not jsut after a period of time...

 

Also, if this does turn out to be a problem, how could i fix it without risk of damaging anything

 

well, off to school for today, i'll leave it to you techies to figure out this one

 

In my unstructured sentence reply yes power problems can cause a lot of problems. when gaming more power is used due to video and cpu usage . windows in general may be stable but as soon as you stress the system psu can heat up and drop from say 12v to 9v making system unstable but upon exiting the game power demand is down and psu has an easier time keeping up. best way to test this is swap out the power supply with another (for example a friends psu) and see if the problem persists.also try running each stick of ram separately ram stick might also be the culprit. hope that was helpful and unstructured enough

 

I'll try the PSU idea first, but the thing is, my PSU was from a reliable source (antec 350w) 350 watts does seem a bit low... i have a DVD drive sound card and wireless card, aswell as a HDD and a fan controller, could this be the culprit?

 

also, now i switched ram from my other computer (also pc3200, which matches my 1gb of corsair) and swapped the other gig into the other computer. I was planning on eventually getting some OCZ dual-channel 2GB, and my physical memory usage never goes above 1gig anyhow, so i'll get abck to you on how that works. It does make sense though, as when i check, once my physical mem usage does go above 1gb, the system slows down, so for now, off to try some games, and i'll get back to you guys on how it all works

 

oh... well i was going to check up on the status of the problem after changing the ram and the same problem occurs... Another problem, is that EVEREST and the foxconn SuperStep are showing different temperature and voltage readings, and on the CSS stress test i got a whopping 26.86fps, and one thing that i did notice, was that my in value was capped at 54.. i dont know what this means but it may help a bit...
Just to make sure it wasnt the processor, i switched the processors (switched 3.0ghz p4 to a 2.4ghz celeron) and the fps was even worse from the start of the game... Also, i dont bbelieve that it's a video card problem as my Radeon X700 had the same problem. Could something be faulty?

 

what voltage is your superstep reading?

 

all the appropriate voltages... within +/- .5 volts...

I used drivercleaner and found some old ATI driver files on my system, so im gonna clean those and do a clean driver install see if that helps any

 

nope saame problem... I repair installed XP and that didnt help.. maybe its a bios thing

 

Did you try a clean install of xp?

 

ill do that, but i have a quick question, and yes, i know its software, but dont tell anyone... Can i backup some part of the registry to back up my isntalled software so i dont have to reinstall everything? or not? All of my games are on other partitions, but there is a lot of them....