Game performance degrading over short period of time

[tingi]

My system:

Pentium D 820 @ 2.8Ghz
2GB DDR2 ram
Asus P5LD2 Deluxe motherboard
nVidia 7800 GTX 256mb
3 SATA2 HDD
500Watt PSU

The problem:

I load up a game and I start playing. The framerate is pretty smooth at start. It starts falling in a few seconds until the game becomes a slideshow and is unplayable. Two games I've been trying to play lately are Bioshock and Pro Evo Soccer 2008. My system is well above the minimum system requirements for both games.

To verify that something was wrong I loaded up Doom 3 and did five timedemos in a row. I used 1280x1024 on ultra quality. On my first run I got an average of 58 FPS. Second run was 48.8 FPS, third 45.3 FPS, fourth 44.4 FPS and the last one 46.1 FPS.

I decided to try the same on a fresh installation of Windows XP. I reinstalled WinXP from scratch, updated w/e was needed, installed latest drivers etc. Still the same thing. I don't remember the numbers for the Doom 3 timedemos but it is still the same picture. Bioshock and PES2008 are smooth once they load and I start playing. In a matter of seconds they become a slideshow.

The only thing that I think of that might be wrong with my system is that my CPU runs hot. It goes up to 80° Celsius under heavy load. Does high temp degrade performance?

 

[Roguestar]

:shocked: 80°C is far too hot! Remove the CPU heatsink, reapply some thermal compound (only a little, mind) and carefully reseat, securely, the CPU cover. Use CoreTemp or something along those lines to check your CPU temperature while idling on the desktop and while running Orthos. (google coretemp and orthos)

And yes, a very high temperature will affect performance; if it's overheating it'll get more calculations wrong and upon checking will have to do them again.

 

[ForumMaster]

80°C? wow. that's almost the maximum temperature that the CPU can handle. Pentiums have a built in temperature sensor. they automatically lower the core frequency to lower the heat output. this would perfectly explain your symptoms. open your case and blow all the dust out. then, take of the heatsink. throw it away. but AC5 and a good heatsink and put it on. the hotter the cpu get's, the shorter it's life will be. when a cpu is hot, certain process begin to happen that can eventually lead to the death of the CPU.

don't let that sucker get above 60. that may seem crazy to you considering you're used to 80. mine is currently idle at 30 on air. never get's past 39. and it is an old AMD Athlon XP-M 2400+ Oc'ed to 2.2Ghz. you have a nuclear reactor cpu there. you might wanna think about replacing that cpu with one of intel's newer, cooler and faster cpu's.