Question Struggling to run old games on my desktop

[NocturneOfSolace]

Now this might be caused by any number of issues, but this is the thread I went to as it's about as general as I can get and deals with my issues.

I've been recently trying to play games like Fallout New Vegas, Fallout 2, or Deus Ex but unfortunately my computer is struggling to do so, yet it runs modern games just fine.

I'll experience where the game either experiences random drops in frames per second for no apparent reason, or will freeze up totally, or freeze and then after a bit resume again, completely at random. I originally thought with FNV that this was just me installing some kind of mod that the game didn't like, but when I started to experience similar things with Deus Ex and Fallout 2 I started to get a faint suspicion that it's something else

Recently my computer suffered from a brief blackout (as in a couple seconds), and it has never run the same since, i.e. it used to boot up in under 30 seconds or so, now it boots up in a minute or more time.

So, my thoughts are this, something was either damaged in the blackout, which is my utmost fear as this computer has hardware that is not exactly inexpensive.

Or, there is something I need to do with Windows 10 that I have not done to make older games work smoothly without issue

I have an AMD Ryzen 2700X 8 Core processor, 16 logical processors

I am running the TUF Gaming x570 Plus with Wi fi for the motherboard

Corsair Vengeance LPX 16 GB DDR 3200

Samsung 970 Evo 1 TB M.2

Nvidia Geforce GTX 750 Ti, this is the old card, I had planned to get a Geforce RTX 3070 but for obvious reasons that hasnt panned out

I don't remember what kind of power supply I have, but it's old and rated for 750 W I believe, can't really see the information without popping the case open either, I'm fairly certain it is a Corsair and rated Bronze

Any help you can offer would be appreciated, it's so frustrating

 

[TerryLaze]

Get into bios and reset it to defaults in case the power loss messed something up.
While at it check the CPU multipliers and the turbo settings.
You want turbo/pbo enabled to get single core speeds as high as possible for old games, new games use a lot of cores and can hide issues with clocks.

 

[Krotow]

Some older games didn't worked well with multi-core CPUs. Fallout 2 is one of them. You must run them in 1 core emulation with CPU affinity 2 (or 4 or 8).

Instruction + explanation for Fallout 2.

 

[NocturneOfSolace]

Get into bios and reset it to defaults in case the power loss messed something up.
While at it check the CPU multipliers and the turbo settings.
You want turbo/pbo enabled to get single core speeds as high as possible for old games, new games use a lot of cores and can hide issues with clocks.

What is PBO?

 

[Krotow]

What is PBO?

Explaining AMD Ryzen Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO), AutoOC, & Benchmarks

 

[NocturneOfSolace]

Well after some time working with things I found the problem entirely by accident thanks to Steam, which noted on a download of a 'Corrupt Disk'

So I ran CHKDSK and sure enough, my secondary HDD was failing

thanks guys