FPS drops in all my games

[AGodo1]

Hello everybody and thanks in advance. From what I'm going to say it seems more like a hardware problem but I'm looking for help where I can. My problem is this: It turns out that for some time now I've had problems with my laptop in terms of games, problems I did not have at first, games have continuous FPS drops or I do not know how to call it since it happens every 10 seconds or less, and this happens with ALL games, even with the least demanding and I mean Age of Empires 1 and Commandos 2 or things like that. It is a laptop with Intel core i3 2330m Intel HD 3000 and 2gb ram. The problem comes from a few months ago, I thought it was the W10 operating system and problems with the drivers, so I formatted and reinstalled but the problem continued. I installed W7 again with the old drivers disk with which the laptop came and tried and the problem continued, so I started to believe that it was hardware. My laptop got very hot and the fan was going full blast so I opened it and removed a lot (a lot) of dust from the ventilation grid, it was practically completely clogged, the temperature went down but the problem was still there, then I remembered that once playing Lord of the rings online (Steam) there was a bug, Windows warning jumped something went offline and the screen went black, apparently the graphics drivers failed, so turn off and restart and everything went back to normal. I do not remember if from that moment the problems started or I already had them, but since I remembered that event I decided to scan the laptop with memtest86 + and there were no errors in the processor or memories, I used open hardware monitor to check the voltage and everything goes normal , I do not remember with what program I scan the hard drive and it is deteriorated but I do not know if that is the problem. I'm thinking about changing the thermal paste to see if that's it but in the meantime I write here to see if anyone has any idea of what might be happening. On the other hand I do not think they are the Windows drivers since I installed Lubuntu and played 0 a.d and the problem was the same.

[n_scott_pearson]

Well, what you have done would seem to point at there being a hardware problem. The likely cause of slowdowns is temperature. The first thing that I recommend you do is download and run the Intel Processor Diagnostic Tool (here's a link for doing so: https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/19792 Download Intel® Processor Diagnostic Tool). It includes a stress test that will determine whether there is an obvious issue with temperatures. If this passes, then you want to watch temperatures while running a more significant stress test. The best stress test software I know of is Prime95. You can download it here: https://www.mersenne.org/download/ GIMPS - Free Prime95 software download. Here's an article that will also help: http://www.playtool.com/pages/prime95/prime95.html Torture test your CPU with Prime95. While you run this tool, you should also run something that will provide you with temperature readings. Open Hardware Monitor is useable, but there are better ones like AIDA64 (download here: https://www.aida64.com/ AIDA64 - The Ultimate System Information, Diagnostics and Benchmark Tool), which has its own stress test built in (this is a pay tool but you can trial run it for free).

Hope this helps,

...S

[AGodo1]

Hi, thanks for your answer. I used IPDT and everything is ok. Temperatures running this test 66 - 67ºC max. I'll run Prime95 and I'll let you know the results