[Tech] Gfx card decline in performance

[Angelic]

Yoes,
tech savvy folks, I have a question: I feel like my gfx card's performance has dropped a fair bit in the last, say, couple weeks. I have no concrete stats to back this up, but I feel like Dalaran is more laggy, I can't run Star Trek with reasonable graphic setting, sometimes even Iron Grip that runs on Q3 engine gets a little choppy.
The card is fairly new, like 9 months or so if I remember correctly, might be a year - so my question is "What could be causing this if I'm running the very same installation of Windows and newest drivers there are?" and "How do I make sure it's not just my imagination, e.g. via some sort of benchmarking or so?". Keep in mind that while I can find my way around most computer stuff, I've never delved into the deeper levels like how exactly does stuff operate and, you know, the more geeky stuff.

Thanks a LOT for your help, I wouldn't like to replace the card so early in its life

Adam

 

[Ronin Storm]

Graphics card slow down sounds unlikely unless the hardware is failing, and that would often be made obvious by graphical artefacts (blips, tearing, solarising, etc).

Gradual experiential slowness could easily be hard drive fragmentation. Even if you're not doing much in the way of file changes, things such as Windows Update will be writing all sorts of files to your disk. If your disk is quite full (>60%) then there's a moderate chance that your drive is fragmented.

I don't rate the Windows built-in defragmentation routine very highly, but I also get cold feet over paying real monies for the professional defragmentation suites. I used IObit Smart Defrag, which is free and seems alright.

Alternatively, I've also found that AVG was the cause of a lot of slowness on my home systems over the past nine months or more. Recently switched to Bit Defender, which has felt much kinder on processor cycles. Might be worth a thought.

 

[Iron_fist]

choppiness can be be caused by more than just the graphics card.
First thing i would look at is check is how hot the card and your CPU are getting. A build up of dust may be causing the card\cpu to slow down to stop it overheating.
Secondly i would look at if your HDD needs defraging, fragmented files take longer to read therefore can cause coppyness.
Thirdly see how much ram is being used, if the ram is nearly fully utilised it will have to "swap" data to the HDD which can slow things down, try quitting unneeded programs to see if that improves the performance
Finally take a look at your antivirus settings and see if "on access scanning" is enabled on the program directory and the data file directory (not sure where it is in W7 but it's in c:\doc and settings\[username]\ and either app data or Local settings\app data on XP)

my guess would be if it's a 9mo\year old card that dust will be the cause, but taking a look at the other things won't harm things either

 

[Angelic]

The Win installation is a couple months old, I have scheduled defrag turned on weekly and even defragged right now. I have the newest drivers installed, just downloaded them today off NVidia site. The CPUs run at 53°C, the card doesn't go over 50°C. I've cleaned both the cpu fan and the gfx card fan off of any dust like two weeks back.

And now I've run 3DMark - I should be getting 12.5k marks with my cpu (e8200 2.66ghz core 2 duo) and gpu (gts250 1gig), but I only get 6k even with Aero turned off and all other programs (even Avast) as well.

 

[Ronin Storm]

Hmm, that's not right. Have you got anything running in the background that's eating into your performance? Automatic updaters? Scanning applications? Viruses/malware?

CPU at 53 seems a little warm but should be well within tolerance. Mine doesn't tend to go much over mid 40's under load, though my cooler is pretty good.

Have you scanned your hard drive for bad sectors? Does it sound like its thrashing at any point?

Same sort of question for your graphics card: does it sound like its fan is going mental when you're running tests?

What you've described doesn't sound like an old system suffering from lack of maintenance. Makes me wonder if summer time temperatures have pushed something over the edge...

 

[Angelic]

No, I killed all the programs, including antivirus, no windows updates running or anything. Since I have Spybot Search and Destroy and Avast scanning my computer at all non-testing times, I would presume my machine is malware/virus-free.

My drive doesn't make any funny sounds, no. I haven't scanned it for bad sectors, I've merely defragmented it.

The fan is running, yes, at the mid-high loudness, but nothing that I would think is pathological. Also, according to GamerHUD (which is like NVidia overclocking instrument - and no, I don't have it OCed) the card doesn't go above 45°C, so that is not an issue. Plus, it's rather cold here lately, no real summer to speak of.

 

[Ronin Storm]

You say you've recently dusted inside your case? Makes me wonder if something has a slightly poor connection. Try removing and then reseating your graphics card, other PCIe/PCI cards?

 

[Angelic]

Will do that. I considered the possibility of staticing parts of my pc too (via the vacuum cleaner pipe static ball of death), but that would mean crashes and stuff like that, I think, not decline in performance.

Psi suggested making a clean install of Windows on a separate partition and re-running the test to see if that was to blame - I however don't have the time for that right now I'm afraid, neither a spare partition and I'm still a bit afraid of resizing partitions with data on them, even using gparted.

 

[thatbloke]

are you on a version of windows that is using windows defender? make sure that is disabled too. as a suggestion, try disabling/unpluggiing all non-essential hardware, including any network cards (diisable them in windoows) and re run the test to see if it has any effect. I would suggest running in safe mode but the grapphics driver won't load if you do...

 

[Angelic]

Done Windows reinstall.
Got newest drivers.
Check for all cables to be plugged in properly.
Cleaned the dust.
Defragmented.
Got 6k benchmarks as opposed to 12k-13 I should be getting again. Several times.

I actually plugged in my spare HD3870 and run the test on her too. 6k as opposed to her proclaimed 12k again.

I'm starting to think it's not the card but rather some other part of my rig. What could be causing this? Aging CPU? Aging PCU?

 

[Ronin Storm]

Unclean or insufficient power could give you trouble, but I don't think it would manifest in this way.

In old motherboard architectures (pre-PCI express) I'd suggest that you had an IRQ conflict and that you should change which PCI slots you use for your cards. I've not seen any mention of that since PCIe, however.

Feels, to me, more likely that RAM is troubling. Sure you've got that in the correct configuration, especially if you're using dual channel?

 

[thatbloke]

Although I couldn't tell you what, precisely, it could be a BIOS setting - maybe have a poke around in the BIOS, or perhaps even reset the BIOS settings to see if it has an effect.