Is this a problem with my graphics card?

[[TW]Fox]

Hi guys,

Occasionally when gaming I get a rather bizarre problem.

Lets say I've been playing CoD4 for 30 minutes (The timing is random) at a nice solid 90fps. Very nice.

All of a sudden, it'll drop to 10-20fps for about 2-3 seconds. Then it will go back to 90fps again. However, 5 seconds after that, the machine pretty much locks up. It hasn't actually locked up - if I'm patient enough I can recover it but it's SO slow it literally takes up to a minute to respond to keystrokes and can take as long as 4-5 minutes to actually get out of the game using task manager.

It always happens the same way - so much so that as soon as I get that initial slowdown I know I've got about 5 seconds to quit the game before the lockup comes. If I manage to quit in time, everything is fine. I can load the game back up and carry on as if nothing had happened.

It's occurance is totally random - sometimes it wont happen for a week sometimes twice in one game. Seems to affect most games.

Got an BFG 8800GT OC, rest of spec as per sig.

Any ideas?

 

[pieman109]

Have you got any applications starting up in the background? I was playing crysis earlier today and all of a sudden the framerate dropped to about 5-6 fps, then shot up to normal, around the 40-45 fps mark. I just turned a few apps off in task manager (can't remember waht the were) and me framerate now holds at 40-45 fps.

 

[[TW]Fox]

Nope, nothing of note anyway.

 

[Scania]

I've had similar issues when my Avast anti virus updates.....

I think it could be a background task interfering somewhere.

 

[paradigm]

What version of the LAN drivers are you on Foxy?

The ones that came on the CD were pretty terrible and gave me symptoms like you describe.

 

[mightynimrod]

Could it be temps and throttling?

 

[[Death]]

only times ive had that is when my memory went bad, run memtest for a while