my current specs are amd athlon 64 x2 4400+, 1 gb (2 sticks 512) DDR crucial ram, antec truepower2 550watt psu, abit KN8 sli mobo, nvidia 7800gt, wdc caviar 250gb hdd, windows xp pro.
The problem i've been having is whenever i play a game for a long time or on high graphics for awhile the fps goes from the hundreds to like 40-20 after a few minutes. I've tried installing all kinds of registry hotfixes and all the other fixes assosiated with dual cores but i just cant figure this one out. When i close the game and go into windows my mouse cursor is all jittery and lagging when i move it.

Nothing is overclocked or anything weird like that, new installation of windows, and i ran memtest86 for 10 minutes to see if it was the ram and got no errors...

I mean, could it be like a bios setting or something causing the cpu to underclock or something? Or maybe something else? I honesly have no clue and have tried everything software wise i can think of. My next step would be to maybe open the case and move the ram around or remount of heatsink to make sure it has full contact or something like that. Any ideas or suggestions are welcome, ty.

Microsoft has a dual core patch that would make XP to behave better with dual core CPU and apps and game that are not quite well behaving with dual core. Other than that, you can set the affinity to one CPU for the game processus in task manager

I think i found someone with the same problem as me: http://forum.abit-usa.com/showthread.php?t=99969

OMG. Pat=God.

Here's the deal... I bought GTA: San Andreas a couple days ago. I was all psyched up to play it. But I encountered serious gameplay issues (everything ran WAAAAAAAAAAY to fast). So I did some googling... didn't find crap. I went on to some Grand Theft Auto forums, no one helped me. I called rockstar... they're like "uhhhhhhh.... we dunno what's wrong."

So I saw this post and thought "hmmm... i'll try what Pat just said."

BAM! The game works like a champ now.

Thx Pat! :-)

-mpjesse