Pc / Gaming Slowdown

[Xaero]

Ok, this has been bugging me for quite a while now and i was wondering if you guys could help me figure it out.

When i start up my pc everything runs fine, graphics in games etc are nice and smooth with high frame rates of more than 60+ on most of the latest games, this is all fine however, until after a while (time varys depending on how intensive on the system the graphics are but somewhere between 20 mins and an hour) it will give a sudden sharp drop in performance to the regions of 20-30 fps.

I asked about this before in the graphics thread as i assumed it had something to do with my graphics card overheating or something, they seemed to concur and i bought a new cooler for my card, fitted it etc, all works and the same thing still happens, I have even tried a new graphics card, a geforce 6800 ultra and the same problem is still occuring.

This is obviously not to do with my graphics card after all, and the fault must lie elsewhere, if anyone can help with this it would be appreciated and if you need further details then just ask me and il provide them.

System spec :

400w power supply
P4 3.0 ghz 800fsb HT enabled
512mb 400mhz DDR RAM
Gainward Geforce 6800 Ultra 256mb

Thanks in advance for any help

 

[zephead]

i'll bet your psu is balking and that gpu is automatically lowerinf it's performance to get by on the lowered voltages. i've seen it happen all the time. what brand and model si the 400w? for your rig i'd reccomend a name brand supply (antec, thermaltake, enermax all examples) of at least 450w.

 

[Xaero]

Hmm, i know what you're getting at, and it might be that, but it even happened when I had a geforce mx440, which compartively takes very little power to the 6800 ultra. I will try what you said though and get a new psu, thanks for the advice, and if you have any other ideas about what it could be please let me know, thanks.

 

[Blakhart]

Hi
If the 400w supply is a good one, it will do fine. I suspect a heat issue at work here. Can you move/add some case fans so they blow more onto the vid card? As well, adding another 512 stick of ram will help greatly in new games, and if your mobo is dual channel, and the mem you have now is on a single stick, adding the second stick to the correct slot will activate dual channel. This is a _major_ boost in system performance. Keep in mind that some games, bf2 being prime example, will run better and better when you have finaly installed 2gigs of ram.

 

[Xaero]

Well I have doubts about how "good" the psu is, as I just got it with the case i bought a mobo set and a case and some other bits and put it together myself, the psu probably does suck and zephead is probably right.

I dont think that it's a heat problem, at least not a gfx card heat problem, my case temp is around 40c usually and my gfx card never goes above about 70c in games, the cooler i have on it takes up a pci slot, so it shouldnt be that...

And yea, i know all too well the difference ram can make to gameplay, not only in game but loading too, im going to get a 1gb stick when i have the money, kinda poor atm lol.

Thanks for the advice

 

[zephead]

you say you have 512MB of ram? this amount doesn't quite cut it for BF2 or farcry or other recent games. i'd say that 1gb of dual channel ddr400 would do fine, as i can attest to. it is possible tha your windows virtual memory (the pagefile on your harddrive) is being assigned that game's data for lack of free DRAM. virtual memory is a major slowdown. you can check the harddrive indicator on your machine when the problem occurrs: if there is no disk activity the problem lies elsewhere...

 

[Gorem8]

I got the same problem here, my first tought was about overheating, but i don´t think there´s enough time to parts to cool down during a simple reboot. I´m afraid it is related to ram problem, but i didn´t think about my psu, i never ever touched/changed it, i think my pc dosen´t need so
much "power". Maybe a ram problem?

Thanks for any help.

P3 750mhz
2x 256md 133
gigabyte geforce mx400 64mb
Yes, i know, it should be in a museum.

 

[zephead]

what about the psu?