Another hellish-FPS thread

[Panda]

Hey everyone,

I've seen about a thousand of these threads all over the place on various different boards and never really got much of an answer from any of them. I know for a fact that my computer, while slightly older and outdated is not a bad computer by any means. I have a tough time understanding why it seems heck-bent on acting like one.

I'll post my specs below but basically, I'm getting pretty terrible FPS the majority of the time - even in low-requirement games. My average FPS is between 10-15. Yet, on games like Mass Effect it boosts to an orgasmic 60+

Any help would be greatly appreciated and I'll answer the more common questions below.

==Brief Spec-list==

PC Age: A couple years
Last Reformat/Defrag/Wipe: One week ago
CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 965 - 3.40GHz
Gfx Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 SE
RAM: 6.00 GB
OS: Windows 7 / 64-Bit
HDD: Single 465GB
Graphic Drivers: Up to date/Current

Cooling/Fans are fine, I've got two primary ones and a third smaller one. The main ones run at 1900RPM or something along those lines. No porn or viruses to speak of and I literally just did a full reset of my computer a week ago in the hopes that it may also help. I tried to provide a HijackThis logfile but the program doesn't seem to want to work for me.

If any further information is required, let me know.

[quaxo]

In the Nvidia control panel, if they're not already set so, set everything to the "let application decide" setting. This can cause problems with framerate in some games.

You only mention Mass Effect as a game that works. Are we talking the first Mass Effect, or the latest Mass Effect 3? They have very different system requirements.

What games specifically are you having problems with? Are the problems constant or do they come and go?