Choppiness and lag in PC games

[caleb-lbj]

Hey guys I have recently started experiencing lag in every game that really should not be lagging. ex minecraft will render very slowly and make me have 1-10 fps and World of Warcraft used to run pretty good on medium setting but now is also lagging it runs but has a choppiness to it. My system specs are

Motherboard Intel Love Valley DG965LV
CPU DualCore Intel Core 2 Duo E6300, 1866 MHz (7 x 267)
Ram 4gb of G Skill F2-6400CL5-2GBPQ
HDD Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 250GB 7200 rpm
Graphics Card NVIDIA GeForce GT 430
PSU Delta DPS-300pb-3a 300 watt
OS: Windows 7 32 bit

My system is old and I am planning on a new one in October but until then I would like to find the culprit.
Thanks guys.

 

[Gman450]

Well, the entire setup doesn't look too powerful. Are you sure you're not having any applications running in the background, that you don't need?
Which drivers are you using for your GT430?

 

[caleb-lbj]

Its not, try about 5 years with occasional upgrading. The drivers are the latest I think ( just upgraded them not too long ago) version 301.42.

 

[Gman450]

Did you have the choppiness issues before the driver update?

 

[caleb-lbj]

Yes it was the same, it seems lately though my cpu usage has been very jumpy from 10 to 70 percentage just in web browsing. In safe mode though it doesn't even bump over 10 in anything I do. I checked with a virus scan and spyware scan to see if it could be something of that nature but nothing appeared. I used to could run TF2 easy before now it just jumps around everywhere in game.

 

[Gman450]

Not sure what may be causing that, but is your CPU underclocked or OC'd?

 

[caleb-lbj]

Well I havent ever touched the voltage setting because I only have a stock cooler on it and didnt want to mess with anything but its supposed to be 1.86ghz and looks like it is running at 1.59 for some weird reason on cpu-z

 

[Gman450]

What does the voltage reading in the BIOS show?
Turn it down.

 

[caleb-lbj]

Well I forgot this is on the gateway with the stock motherboard so I cannot mess with the voltages 🙁

 

[Gman450]

That sucks. The voltage seems a bit high. Intel's website shows it's max as 1.5V.
Try this software.
http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/System-Info/RightMark-CPU-Clock-Utility.shtml

 

[caleb-lbj]

Ok well I must have read wrong on accident that was its clock rate. the voltage is 1.325v

 

[jay2tall]

Anything in the background running, like a virus scan or windows backup? You could also run CCleaner and see if you can clear out old files and bad registry entries. It will also show you what your PC is booting up with. You could go through the list and remove apps from your startup. Not sure if this will really correct the issue, but there may be a smoking gun somewhere in there.

Did this slowness start all of a sudden? If so do you remember installing anything just prior to the issue?

 

[caleb-lbj]

Well Malware bytes and avast are in the background but just as normal protection. I am only using 32% of the memory. I installed the 430 and the Ram at around the sam time. But I have had bsod with and some issues with the Ram or something because the whole computer has been choppy since this upgrade. I ran WoW before on low setting with a 7600gt way better than with this 430.

 

[Gman450]

So, since upgrading to the GT430, you've had performance downfalls? That doesn't sound too weird because I don't think the GT430 is a lot more powerful than a 7600GT..

 

[theonerm2]

You should test your RAM in the Windows Memory diagnostic tool because I suspect you might have defective RAM. You are running RAM intensive applications and complaining about problems. Also Blue screens if they are pretty frequent are a dead give away that you could have bad RAM. Test your RAM and RMA it if it's defective. Your GPU and CPU should have no issues running those games at medium settings.

Suggestion: If you have more than one stick of RAM try running with one of them to see if you still get the same problems. Then try the other by itself. This will help you narrow down which stick of RAM is bad or it will help you find out if your RAM slot is bad.