Need help troubleshooting bad gaming performance

[DeusVex]

■ I built a PC a few months back(As Rock Pro4 mobo, Intel Core i5 4590, GTX 960, 8gigs of 1600mhz HyperX ram, Syntrey 600w power supply, and 2 SSDs) and rather than buy a new OS I installed the Windows 10 developer preview. For a while there all my games were running great(Witcher 3, Wolfenstein, Far Cry 4, etc) but then I had a problem with the power supply (I'm guessing the capacitors went bad because it was a cheap POS) so I had to replace it. I opted for a 500w EVGA 80+ plus certified this time. When I got my PC back up in running things were moving a little sluggish so I "refreshed" the OS. Well, something went wrong because it froze up and I ended up having to do a complete fresh install. Now I'm running build Win10 Pro build 1024 with all my drivers re-downloaded.
On to my problem now. Every single one of my games is running like crap. At first when the game loads I sometimes have maybe 10 to 30 seconds of smooth gameplay then everything gets choppy. My games play the EXACT same regardless if I turn down the setting to as low as it will go or as high as it will go. It's almost like something else starts hogging the power as soon as I start a game. I even went through Task Manager making sure there were no auto open programs and closed anything that didn't need to be running.
So what gives? Could it be a virus? Something I did wrong? I would be grateful for any advice.

 

[James Mason]

are 100% sure you have the latest video drivers?
http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/87789/en-us

My Windows 10 ran a bit bad at first because it was using the default windows driver, because windows update was having trouble downloading/installing the nvidia driver itself.

You may also want to use DisplayDriverUninstaller to cleanly remove your drivers before installing the new/latest one, it solves a lot of issues.

 

[Nick80835]

I suggest you to reinstall the video driver like James Mason said, but also check for viruses using ADW Cleaner or Hitman PRO, I have felt the sting of a malacious performance robbing virus! Also try this:
Hit Ctrl+Alt+Del
Goto task manager
Hit show more detail
Goto startup tab
Check for any programs you dont want running at boot and disable them

That helped my boot lag and smoothed out my internet connection because microsoft cloud was hogging my bandwidth.

 

[DeusVex]

You may also want to use DisplayDriverUninstaller to cleanly remove your drivers before installing the new/latest one, it solves a lot of issues.

I'm gonna give that a shot. Maybe reinstalling the drivers from scratch will help. Games that were running blazing fast now are ALL stuttering. Granted, the games are playable but the stuttering gets worse over gameplay time. But yea, all my drivers are up to date.

 

[Nick80835]

It just occured to me that you may have 1 or more bad fans/ cooling systems, check your gpu and cpu temps to make sure its not that.

 

[DeusVex]

My temperatures are good and I reinstalled my drivers and the problem is still here. It's actually getting worse. The other night I downloaded Hitman Absolution from my steam library over night while I was sleeping and the next morning before I went to work I played through the first stage with all the settings maxed out and the game ran flawless. When I got home, I turned my computer on and loaded the game.....ANNNND back to the stuttering glitch fest. I don't get it. I'm no "IT" pro by any means but I'm decent at computer stuff. I've always been the guy everyone would come to if they needed help with any computer problems, but this? I can't find any logical reason why it's doing this. It has to be Windows 10 build 10240 that's the problem. Maybe my NVidia drivers aren't getting along with windows 10's auto update thing, I actually did read that somewhere. I can't see any other reason. Thoughts???