Games run slower after few minutes of playing

[Rafiraf]

Hello. My problem is quite weird - new games, with advanced graphics, such as Call of Duty 5, GTA IV, Race Driver GRiD after playing any of them few minutes (maybe about 5-10) run slower, however the first minutes of playing are comfortable, with high amount of FPS, after that few minutes FPS amount goes down, making playing almost impossible (15-20 FPS I guess). When I alt-tab them and wait few minutes, it goes to normal, but only for a while. It doesn't matter if the graphics settings are minimum or maximum, the same happens. I've experienced this problem several monthes ago, but after formating HDD and reinstaling my Windows XP PRO SP3 all games were working fine. However, recently the problem came back and even formating half of the HDD with the system didn't help.

My PC is:
Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 1.86 Ghz
GF 8800 GTS 320 MB (latest official drivers)
3 (2+1) GB RAM 533 Mhz (Kingston)
Motherboard - ECS P4M890T-M2
power is 450W Warrior or something like that
HDD 250 GB

Thanks in advance!

[smeezekitty]

your processor is probubly overheating
and throttleing down to comphensate

[Allan]

Open Task Manager to the Processes tab. Click the title "cpu" at the top of the cpu column twice to sort that column with highest usage at the top. Leave task manager open and play your game. When it starts to slow down look at Task Manager. Is there a process with a high number in the cpu column?

[Rafiraf]

I don't think it's overheating - when the problem appeared the first time, formating helped. My GPU and CPU temperatures are way too high however, but it's not the reason, because with the same temperatures everything was working correctly time ago.
And no, there is no process or application slowing down my PC.
I've read that what causes this may be not much enough space on HDD, but I've got over 90 GBs of free space on C and over 30 on D.

[smeezekitty]

if its a desktop
try running with the case open
and a fan blowing inside and see how it does
also you could try a defrag

[joevh09]

have you tried running defrag on it? that may help if you haven't. And you say it has been overheating, could you try and check to see what everything is running at temperature wise? Another thing i noticed is that you're Ram is only 533mhz, which would also cause the games to run slower

[great_compressor_pain]

Sum days before my pc was
P4 processor
80 gb hdd
1gb ram
512 mb Nvidia 9400 GPU


and i exaxtly had the same problem just like u have
I tried using GAME ACCELERATOR it worked

now i just changed ma pc

[Hateadub]

Alright, i really think that the overheating thing is what is bottlenecking your system. When the video card or the cpu get overly high, things start to slow down and get real choppy.

Since you have alot of free space on your HD, you can try to clean up some of those BS files. use ccleaner, and then a disk defrag, and a disk cleanup. This should speed things up a little.

I would take the side panel off your pc, and then put a fan near it. If it doesnt do it you will then know your problem. Good luck man.

[Juice217]

Careful about overheating, if the comp is in a small room w/ poor ventilation you can cause permanent damage to the CPU. So reloacting the Comp is an option too.

[Blake00]

Man, i had the same problem.
I downloaded GameBooster from download.com
It makes all of your games run smoother,and drastically reduces lag.
It's great man!

[DaveLembke]

Motherboards BIOS's at times also try to be energy conservative for some builds. Go into Bios and make sure that power saving features are disabled so its running full speed all the time. I had a Intel Dual-Core 2.4Ghz HP that ticked me off with the powersave feature clocking up and down the games exectution process. Went in there and shut off power save features for optimum performance and games were smooth then on.