Whats wrong here then?

[Lord Alibaski]

Somone asked for help on a forum I go on any of you lot any ideas on this one.

Ok first before I go into this, I'd like to thank everyone that's helped me w/ my comp problems here... u know who u are =)

Specs:
Windows Vista Ultimate
Athlon X2 3800+ Toledo (not overclocked, stock at 2.0 ghz)
1GBx2 Corsair CMX1024-3200C2PT RAM
eVGA 8800GTS Superclocked
Sound Blaster Audigy 4
Antec TruePower 480W

I got myself the 8800gts like about a week ago and that's when I started having problems. Basically this is what happens: Anywhere between 5-30 minutes while playing a game, the fps would drop dramatically. For example, in Team Fortress 2, the FPS would drop from 50-80fps to 10-20fps randomly in-game.

Alt-Tabbing or Restarting the game doesn't work. In fact, once the FPS drops, then ANY game that I try will have drastically reduced FPS.

At first I thought it was something wrong with my GPU... I heard that there was this memory leak in 8800gts that plagued a lot of people, and I was suspicious about this too.

In addition, I thought that I didn't have enough RAM... I have 2GB but when I play Team Fortress 2, about 90% is used up, so I might run out of RAM.

However, I noticed I was getting this problem no matter what game I played - be it Team Fortress 2 or Pro Evo Soccer 2008 (Demo). In fact, when I play PES 2008, I only have 55% of RAM used up, yet at random times when I play, the FPS would drop to 25-30.

However, more interestingly, when I play PES 2008 and the FPS drops, the game runs at 1/2 the speed (as opposed to running at full speed but being choppy). That made me wonder whether there was something going on with the CPU.

So I did a quick test... I ran SuperPi and I counted to 4million digits right after I restart the computer - takes 3 minutes 47 seconds. Then I started up Team Fortress 2 and then played until the FPS dropped. I closed TF2, and I ran to 8 million digits again with SuperPi... this time it took 7 MINUTES and 51 SECONDS. Which is, basically double the time of when my computer is ok.

So I think basically what is happening is that one of my CPU cores shuts down on high load, or something like that. The only way for me to play at normal FPS is to restart the computer. Is there something wrong with my power Supply? An 8800gts requires only a 400W power supply, and I have a 480W... Is that enough?

How do I check to see whether my Power Supply is pumping enough power to the rest of my system?

Any help is appreciated, including any other potential problems with my comp =) Thanks!

 

[Cupra]

what hdd are you using and is yor pf on that hd
as imo its the hdd slowing you down seen this happen a few times when the hdd is nearly full i belive hyper ont his forum had the exact same problem and so did raiderx

only other thing is heat / psu

 

[Amnesia]

your friend also needs to keep an eye on the temps....tell him to try the latest drivers which are meant to sort the memory leakage on the 8800gts 320mb
and also install software so he can keep an eye on the temps.
btw it isnt always cpu and graphics that overheat....ive had a problem in the past where it was one of the chips on the motherboard.

 

[Andy100]

I ran SuperPi and I counted to 4million digits right after I restart the computer - takes 3 minutes 47 seconds. Then I started up Team Fortress 2 and then played until the FPS dropped. I closed TF2, and I ran to 8 million digits again with SuperPi... this time it took 7 MINUTES and 51 SECONDS. Which is, basically double the time of when my computer is ok.

Sounds like his CPU is fine to me. It took double the time to do double the digits