Games stuttering/freezing after 5 minutes.

[Celegus]

Just today, all of my games have started getting incredibly choppy or altogether freezing after 5 minutes of working perfectly fine. Earlier today, I installed AMD Dual-Core Optimizer Version 1.1.4 and Windows XP Service Pack 3 in an effort to make Dawn of War 2 stop crashing all the time. It seemed to be working fine and then boom - crash after 5 minutes. Other games like Mass Effect and Counter Strike Source just get unplayably choppy after 5 minutes. So I uninstalled both of those in an effort to fix the problem they seem to have created - but it still does it. Is there some kind of registry cleaning I'd need to do other than just uninstalling them from the control panel?

Or...could it be something completely unrelated and just a big coincidence? My first thought was that it could be overheating (fan stopped working or something) but each core only peaks at around 45 degrees (while running Mass Effect once it starts stuttering).

And my basic specs are:
Windows XP 32bit w/ SP2
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5600+
3328MB RAM
ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series

Let me know if full dxdiag would be useful and I can post it. Thanks in advance...my PC is practically useless to me without games!

 

[Celegus]

I checked the BIOS and the onboard video is disabled and all the memory settings were fine on auto (5-5-5-18). I'm not sure where to check the voltage thing though.

Since it started acting up, I updated to ATI 9.10 drivers from 9.9. I rolled back to 9.8 now though and there's no change in any games.

I know my brother's taken apart one of his video cards and replaced the thermal compound before when his card overheated. I can ask him for some pointers on it or see if he wants to take a look at it next time he's over since I'm generally pretty clumsy with stuff like that.

 

[swifty_morgan]

When you're in the bios, look for something like "load optimized defaults" or something similar. Save as per instruction on the bottom of the screen and reboot.
Another thing to try would be to get your brother or one of your nearby friends to let you borrow a reasonably good power supply and swap it out.
Can't remember if you said you tried another video card. This would be another simple swap out. Takes minutes. Make sure you uninstall the old drivers first and then install drivers after swap.

 

[Celegus]

As soon as my brother can make it over (next couple days hopefully), we're going to replace the thermal compound on the video card. I took the card out yesterday and unscrewed the fan and dusted it out real good. I didn't realize it gets so dusty in there as well, and I actually noticed a difference in my games. Mass Effect lasted 15 minutes before it started stuttering, which definitely lends itself to the overheating theory. Thanks again for all the help swifty and ryan, and I'll post again to update if replacing the thermal compound fixed it or not.

 

[swifty_morgan]

Did you do the same for the heat sink on the processor ?

 

[Celegus]

Well, we replaced the thermal compound on the video card and that didn't seem to do anything. We tried another video card and still the same thing. It's not the processor, since each core only hit low 50s at its highest from stress-testing Prime95 for about an hour. We were quite stumped.

Then my wife remembered about the system restore function and I rolled everything back to 10/23, the day before everything went nuts. And it works fine! My best guess is that one of the Windows updates broke it as there were about 50 updates listed in the control panel that it installed prior to installing SP3 (I rarely ever update Windows, now I probably never will again). And since the only thing I really cared about was getting my computer back to how it was in the first place so that I could play games again, that's exactly what system restore does best. I just never knew that it existed. So, thanks again for all your help, but it looks like my best answer award goes to my wife. ;O