Video Card FPS Drops

[mikeaaronc]

When I am playing games my FPS will drop drastically for no reason whatsoever. It will go from smooth to almost unplayable every 30 seconds to a minute, then it will go back to being fine. It doesn't matter if there is a lot of action on the screen or not. I seem to notice it happen a lot more often when playing RTS games like Supreme Commander and Command and Conquer 3. I didn't really notice it that much on older games like half life 2 and doom 3 when I tried them... Maybe because they aren't as graphically challenging?

Ive tried installing the latest drivers for my mobo and my video card. I even tried rolling back my vidcard drivers to older ones and using driver cleaner profesional to clean any unwanted driver files that could cause problems...

I have run multiple spyware checks using multiple programs and have run multiple virus checks also. I don't think its an overheating issue because I haven't had this problem before and haven't added anything. Also I have a sufficient PSU (Thermaltake truepower 450W). Im using formating as a last result because its such a dang pain. I guess I am running out of ideas on what it could be other than my video card or mobo dying.

I did recently add 2 512 sticks of corsair ram and added a hitachi 320 GB SATA hard drive. Could SATA be chugging my system down somehow?

Specs:
AMD Athlon 64 3500
Gigabyte nforce3 ultra 250GB K8N939-SC Chipset
2 Gig Corsair Value Select Dual Channel RAM
Western digital Caviar 80 GB
Hitachi 320 Gig SATA HD

 

[raybay]

SATA drive should not be part of the problem. You might have a slight memory mismatch, as Corsair Value Select is a bit slower, more problematic memory. What happens when you use only matched modules?

 

[mikeaaronc]

I actually bought the same exact ram to avoid incompatibility issues so I now have 4 512 sticks... I thought maybe somehow sata might be chugging if its not working right..

Update:

I opened up my case and noticed an insane amount of dust and hair in the thing that wasn't there a month ago. I pulled my video card out and actually took a vacuum cleaner hose and sucked up all the crap and made sure all the connecters on the agp bus itself and the card were clean. I then took my processor fan off and noticed an enormous clump of hair and crap and dust lodged in between the heatsink so i sucked that up as much as i could and pryed the rest with my fingers LOL.

To my surprise I haven't had a hiccup yet in c&c 3 even once! Before the game would chug every 30 seconds, I played for about 45 mins straight to see if it would happen.

It must of been either a heating problem from all the dust or a bad connection from the dusty connectors. This could be an issue that many people have had before but never bothered to check.