Sudden Instability and Bad Performance

[Menyonko]

I've had my PC since August of last year and, up until recently, it has worked wonderfully. About two weeks ago, I began playing Skyrim again, a game my rig can play on max settings with ease. The game began to act strange, with common frame drops and some micro stuttering. In an effort to fix the problem, I removed all mods, deleted all saves, and uninstalled the game. When I reinstalled it, I was still only getting 20-40 FPS average. I thought it was simply an issue with the game, and went to play The Witcher 3, which was still performing great on high settings. A few days after the bad Skyrim performance, I decided to pull up Borderlands 2. I made a new save, and what do I find? Bad performance, even after configuring the game to very low graphical settings. Other programs have also acted slightly strange, crashing more often than they did before. For example, Chrome will crash quite often. If anyone has any suggestions as to what the issue is, I would be immensely thankful.

Specs (if anyone needs them):
Intel Core i5 6500 @ 3.2 GHz
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1060 Windforce OC 6GB
8 GB HyperX Fury DDR4 @ 2133 MHz
Gigabyte GA-Z170-HD3
Corsair H60 Liquid Cooler
EVGA 600 Watt PSU

 

[DMinion]

Do you have the latest graphics drivers for the gtx 1060? Also check in bios to make sure your graphics priority is pcie and not igpu.

 

[Menyonko]

I installed the new graphics drivers from Nvidia, and the BIOS does show that it is set to PCIe, and the frame rate issues still persist. I'm fairly sure the issue is CPU rather than GPU bound, as the frames only drop when there are enemies around in game. I reseated the RAM and the graphics card, and nothing has performed in terms of performance.