Strange FPS drop in WoW

[DasSmoof]

Hi all, I'm having a bizaare problem I think may be Hardware related.

It seems to happen with most my games lately, Oblivion, Half-Life 2, WoW, etc.

I just logged on WoW after a cold boot. I had two other programs running, Winamp and Firefox. Well, after jumping on WoW, I was getting a great 50-60 FPS at 1280x1024 res. I wanted to see the consistancy, so I fought a few things and it was fine. But during my third fight, all of a sudden, the FPS dropped into the 20's. Going back to areas where I was previously getting the higher FPS did absolutely nothing. So I downgraded the res to 800x600 just to see what would happen and I STILL get 20FPS.

Any ideas? I used to have this PC (video and CPU) overclocked, but no longer as I saw no real gains.

The PC is currently a
Athlon X2 4200
GeForce 6800GS
1gig 333MHZ ram (Blah)
7200RPM HD
Anything else?

The PC was great when I first put it together, but now, I'm not sure what is up. It seemed to start doing this after a few months of OCing it. Will a fresh reinstall of XP help, or would it be in vain?

 

[xanis]

Well since it was fine before and your setup is pretty decent, I'm going to say it looks like software problem. Before you go into the game, check the Processess window and see if there's anything that could be sucking up your resources.

 

[DasSmoof]

Nothing seems too off in the processes. WoW is sucking up 540k+ and the next largest is winamp and firefox at 13k and 22k respectively. Nothing over 5k after that and nothing that would use up my memory all the way up to the gig I have.

This is after a reformat. I decided top see what would happen, so I completely reformatted and reinstalled everything.

editl: and I'm still getting pisspoor FPS