What could be the problem?

[SpeeDyy]

Hi!

One of my friends is having problem at playing Counter-Strike Source game. He usually had constant 250 FPS before. Nowadays (~1 month), he is having 150-200 FPS and about 10 seconds it falls under 100, sometimes 50 (so that makes huge lags for him). He has tested the temperature of his graphic card, but it is/was normal.
Some days ago, he ran a test with 3dmark and everything was ok, but CPU test. As you can read lower, he has 3.10 GHz, but the test result showed him 0.765 for CPU clock. May this could be the source of the problem?
Also, he has a pretty old (5 years) hard disk and (a) CRT monitor, that could make some trouble.
By the way, he has reinstalled his PC, but it didnt change anything, so its probably a hardware problem. He has been thinking about purchasing new hardwers, but we are not sure about the problems.

He has the following configuration:

Motherboard - GIGABYTE GA-M68M-S2P
CPU - AMD Phenom II 550 3.10 GHz
RAM - KINGSTON 2GB 800 MHz
Graphic card - NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT 512 MB
Monitor - IIYAMA Vision Master Pro 451
General resolution - 1024*768 @ 140hz
OS - Microsoft Windows 7
Hard disk - Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB (bought about 5 years ago)


I hope someone could help us and solve this problem!

 

[trents]

Has he tested CPU temps or core temps? Sounds like some thermal down throttling may be happening.

 

[SpeeDyy]

CPU temp: 33-34
CORE: 26-27

 

[SpeeDyy]

He checked the working of his PC in Everest, and he saw a strange thing at the CPU clock.
It is changing all the time:
3000 then jump down to 700 then 1000, and keep being different second to second.
Should he change his CPU or are there any results for this problem?

 

[trents]

Are those core temps and CPU temps under l00% load (think Prime95 blend for 10 minutes) or are they idle temps. If idle temps, they don't necessarily mean much.

 

[trents]

As to the bigger question of the CPU frequency variation, my best guess would be the motherboard is flaky. It's a cheap board to begin with and how long has it been running. Also, with that board did your friend realize how much of a performance compromise he is experiencing? The HT Link rating of that board is 1000 mhz (2000 MT) whereas the CPU is rated at 2000 mhz HT Link speed. That's really going to slow down read/writes to disk and PCI-e performance.

How old is the PSU? For sure the hard drive needs replacing. 5 yrs. on a hard drive is pushing it.

 

[QuietIce]

...

 

[Archer0915]

I say if the temps are an issue clean the HSF better yet just open it up and check (5 bucks says dirty HSF among other thing with dust bunnies). Blow out everything including the PSU.

 

[SpeeDyy]

Thanks for answering and advising, we have now some idead what the problem could be