Computer has become slow after only a week

[Saberman]

So I dropped a bunch of money on Black Friday for a brand new gaming computer. I will list the parts I bought.

Yesterday, everything worked fine. I had no framerate problems and could play all the games I play on top tier settings with well over 40-50 fps. I turn my computer on today (and even after several reboots, a virus scan, monitoring temps, checking task manager for CPU, etc.) it is running slower and I have to put my games to the lowest settings just to pull off 24 fps.

I have done everything I could think of to diagnose the problem and I can't seem to find any. I've done what I could from googling it and reading about solutions on multiple forums, and the steps that I could perform, I did. This includes getting software from WD to see if my hard drive was functional, which seemed to be one of the big suggestions people offered. Didn't make a difference unfortunately.

Parts List:

i5-4440 Processor
EVGA Nvidia Geforce 660
Z87-G41 PC Mate Motherboard
8 gigs of RAM

Those are the parts I imagine might be relevant to this issue.

I have updated all the drivers I can, so that suggestion is already ruled out.

 

[Vudue Priest]

SSD or HDD? If HDD is it a donor or new? Have you looked under performance monitor for parked cores on that i5?

 

[Saberman]

SSD or HDD? If HDD is it a donor or new? Have you looked under performance monitor for parked cores on that i5?

It's a brand new WD 1TB Blue HDD.

And how would I check for parked cores?

 

[Vudue Priest]

check this out http://www.ultimatecomputers.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3644

 

[Saberman]

check this out http://www.ultimatecomputers.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3644

Following those steps didn't fix it. My games are still barely able to run.

 

[Vudue Priest]

any recent updates to drivers or Microsoft security updates? perhaps a system restore to yesterday?

 

[Saberman]

I did all my driver updates before yesterday. Nothing was downloaded yesterday so there shouldn't be any difference between yesterday and the day before.

 

[Vudue Priest]

Depends on if you leave it on over night, windows may have done an update depending on when the auto update is set for. when you are in task manager what do your processes and mem usage looking like? Under disk manager what is the health of you HDD looking like?

Do you have your HDD partitioned? like C: is for your OS and then a partition D: is everything else?

 

[Saberman]

The computer goes into hibernate at night. My RAM usage is only just over 2 gigs, and my CPU usage when I'm not doing anything is usually between 0-5%.

I do not have the HDD Partitioned. Everything is in C:

 

[Vudue Priest]

I'm wondering if you have some faulty ram. Perhaps try running windows memory utility or memtest86

 

[Vudue Priest]

Hey brother, any updates on this?

 

[Saberman]

Yeah, sorry for never answering. A friend came over and downloaded some CPU monitoring software. It turned out that something in the BIOS forced the CPU to always be in a low power state even though it was saying that the CPU COULD run at full power, so it was some kind of software error. The CPU was only running at about 800 MHz instead of 3.1 GHz. So we manually changed the setting in the BIOS so that it was running at full power at all times.

 

[Vudue Priest]

Wow... That's was completely not what I was thinking it would be. Well good stuff mate.