pronounced program stutter in win7/possible failing cpu?

hey. in the last week i've noticed some extreme stutter in processing intensive tasks, namely during gaming but occasionally during video playback. it's not typical of one time memory leaks or anything else i could explain away and it affects every game i have installed on my pc, regardless of resolution and video settings, so it's a continual problem.

i seem to be able to trace the origins of the problem to the day i installed arkham city, which was around the 28th. the pc version of the game is notorious for stutter and i was having the same issues i'd read about even in dx9. granted, my processor is old, but i should have been able to handle the game smoothly on decent settings. to try to alleviate the problem, i installed nvidia's latest beta drivers and then went to the game's redistributable folder to make sure i had the appropriate runtimes installed. it was then that i ran the .NET 3.5 framework included with the game just for the hell of it, thinking it couldn't hurt. once it installed, win 7 flagged it as a possibly damaged install, but i figured that was just win 7's mistake.

from there, i started playing the game again and noticed worse stutter to the point that the game would freeze for moments at a time on certain occasions. i thought maybe the beta drivers were to blame, so i reverted and ended up with the same issue, which i then assumed was a bugged game. fast forward to this week and i'm getting the same kinds of hangs and stutter in all my games.

i took the effort of doing a clean install of the latest certified video drivers, i uninstalled nvidia's HD audio driver and disabled HD audio on my video card and i reinstalled the latest .NET 4.0 framework, but i still have this issue. i even ran disk defrag with no change. is there something i could be overlooking or is it likely that my processor is failing and arkham city may have just pushed it past its limit? i wish i had a restore point to test against, but i don't

my specs:
athlon 64 x2 7750 2.7ghz (socket am2)
evga nforce 730a socket am2 motherboard
geforce gtx 260
4gb g.skill ddr2 800

 

i think i may have found the source of the problem. i have an old dvd-rw drive installed that is known to work on a whim (it survived a fried power supply). around the same time i was trying to get arkham city to go smoothly i unplugged its power connection but left its IDE cable in.

this morning i notice the drive buzzing as if it's still being accessed, so i unseated the IDE cable and the stutter seems to have cleared up. is it possible the motherboard was repeatedly trying to access the dvd drive and failing because of the lack of power? i didn't think that could happen under the circumstances, but i'm no hardware expert. does that seem consistent with the problems i've described?