I've been getting the feeling that my computer has recently (past few months) been performing worse than it should be, but convinced myself it wasn't. It's gotten to the point now, however, where I feel that it is undoubtably running much slower than it should be in games.
The relevant specs are:
4gb ram
i7 q840m 1.87GHz cpu
Nvidia GTX 460M gpu
1920x1080 resolution
I just downloaded dishonored, and the game won't run above 5 fps on MINIMUM graphics. WoW on Medium graphics runs noticeably slowly just standing around stormwind (15-20 fps).
The biggest variation I've noticed is in HoN, which I run on max graphics, sometimes smoothly at 40-50 fps, sometimes it drops to 10-15 fps. I've noticed that occasionally a system restart fixes this game in particular, not really making a notable improvement to others.
My hard drive is NEW and my OS was reinstalled 3 months ago. My hard drive is not overly full, and I check for gpu driver updates regularly. I am also careful to run as little as possible in the background.
The curious thing is that with system monitoring tools on a second monitor (which I disable normally for gaming, but leave on to run system monitor tools) my components don't seem to be being fully utilized at all, even when the game is running slowly. I'm no expert on how a CPU works, but the load rarely passes 70% and normally sits around 50% even when a game is running very slowly. My GPU likewise doesn't seem to be under any particular strain, although it is more often at high load according to GPU-Z.
Is there anything that could be preventing games, particularly steam games I've noticed, from using my computer's full power? It's not a high end machine really, not any more, and I plan to build a real desktop when I move out and go to uni (college), but that's months away and I'm going to be travelling for the next few months, so it would be useful to have a computer I can reasonably game on.
Thanks for any help you can provide