Sudden performance drops

[Bremykt]

My PC sometimes get performance drops and they are quite severe. My specs are: AMD Phenom quad 3.2Ghz, 8Gb ram (one Apacer 4Gb, one Dominator 2Gb and one Kingston 2GB), Palit GTX 460, MSI 880GMA-E55, a cheap 650w PSU, a 60Gb Corsair SSD and 1,5 TB in two separate HDD's.
The reasons for the low end mobo is that my old one broke and the shop didn't have anything else for my CPU, same reason for the RAM, except that those chips where bought wherever I found RAM. I have overclocked my CPU, but that was only to 3.8Ghz and with good cooling, also I have a networking card placed right in front of my GPU's fan because the mobo doesn't have any more space for it. I really have no idea of which of my components are causing it or any software that might be cause it. Any suggestions will be appreciated.

[Bremykt]

The CPU is no longer overclocked, because I used AMD overdrive only. The processor is running cool, it's got good cooling and I have no beckground programs running, which arent necessary. I'm going to do some temps tests and post my results afterwards. And thanks for for MSCONFIG, didn't know about it =).

[Bremykt]

Yeah, I'll check that too, but it might take some time getting results because the perf drops don't come often and I just need to restart to get the perf back.

[Bremykt]

I ran the temp tests and they werent too bad, but they were higher than excepected. All the tests were run with no perfromance drop.
GPU IDLE=49c
CPU IDLE=35c
GPU MAX=77c
CPU MAX=63c
I ran Crysis on a few lvls in max setting except for no af and only 1440x900 res.

The cl on the Kingston and Apacer were 9, but 8 on the Dominator.
I also forgot to mention that the video card is heavily factory overclocked. I don't even know it's base speeds.
I will have to test the resource monitor once I actually get a performance drop, they are a little rare. The BIOS v was 25.2 actually. Also, if I remember correctly, I still had performance drops when I only had the Apacer 4Gb and two Dominator chips.

[300]

with amd cpu first i try to disable Cool'n'Quiet in bios. Works for me. I have had the same problems.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-2047208.html

[Bremykt]

Fps isn't the problem, not directly, it's that the overall performance of my computer gets lowered until I restart it. I guess I should have explained it more thorough. Sometimes it just gets really weak and I can't even run Bad Company 2 at max, it just looks like a slideshow.

[Telekinetic Rex]

You might want to check that your hdd isn't trying to do too many things at once. As soon as the performance drop happens, open task manager/resource manager and keep an eye on anything that might be maxed out. I assume you keep windows and programs on your SSD and everything else on your other drives?

If you could define performace drops i.e. slow response that would help..

It could even be a dodgy psu not throwing out enough power.

last resort reinstall windows

[Bremykt]

Yeah, but win 7 actually ins't on the SSD because last time I reinstalled win, was because the SSD was broken, so I didn't have it. The only things I keep on the SSD are heavy games, until next time I reinstall of course. The performance drops are on everything, games, browser and even windows explorer. I also got a wierd performance drop in a game yesterday, but I'm not sure if it was a performance drop like the others. The game just started lagging, not low fps, but just "stopping" for one or two seconds. I checked the res monitor and it seemed one of the HDD's were doing a lot of stuff. The problem is that when the HDD stop doing so much, the "stopping" in-game was still there.

[Telekinetic Rex]

{Ñ-D-F}Col.Sakeus eredeti hozzászólása:

Yeah, but win 7 actually ins't on the SSD because last time I reinstalled win, was because the SSD was broken, so I didn't have it. The only things I keep on the SSD are heavy games, until next time I reinstall of course. The performance drops are on everything, games, browser and even windows explorer. I also got a wierd performance drop in a game yesterday, but I'm not sure if it was a performance drop like the others. The game just started lagging, not low fps, but just "stopping" for one or two seconds. I checked the res monitor and it seemed one of the HDD's were doing a lot of stuff. The problem is that when the HDD stop doing so much, the "stopping" in-game was still there.

OK well I would suggest moving all your games to the regular hd, formatting the ssd and reinstalling windows there.

SSDs are currently designed for operating systems.. running intensive games on them may lower performance.

[Vynn Tage]

you still get some benefits while your games are on a hdd and your os is on an ssd. While not the instant load of ssd it is still much shorter then if you only had a hdd.
The pagin file space used by windows on th ssd is responsible in part for this, its basicly the swap between the harddrive and RAM.

[Peri]

Also, it's possible that your computer doesn't like your RAM configuration. I know that when you get into mixing and matching like that, things can go haywire (due to differences in the RAM, like latency)

[Bremykt]

Well, I don't want to reinstall windows unless it fixes my problem, which I don't know yet. And yes I know I should, just to get windows on the SSD, but I don't want to reinstall windows just to get windows faster. I'm going to do some testing while haveing a performance drop, but I haven't had one since two days ago. I appreciate all the responses, and as I wrote above, the RAM latency actually aren't the same, so that might just be it, but idk yet.

[Bremykt]

Would memtest-86 teach us anything?

[Peri]

If the RAM has an actual physical problem, yes, but I doubt it'll find anything because the RAM most likely functions fine, it's just the system that doesn't like the config.

[Bremykt]

Ok, I think I'll try to run in, just in case.

[Vynn Tage]

try setting the virtual paging pool to just be on the ssd (then you dont have to reinstall windows), and as stated try not to mix and match ram.