Games suddenly unplayable

[PFCWintergreen]

I just built a computer for myself and everything has been working fine for about two weeks, and as of yesterday I can no longer play anything. The graphics are incredibly choppy, regardless of what resolution I choose or graphics settings I choose.

This is a fresh computer, and all I've installed is Firefox, FoxIt, Steam and MS Security Essentials. I've used EVGA's GPU monitoring tool (Precision) to watch the temperature of the graphics card, and it hovers between 52'C (idle) and 68'C (when I attempt to play games). Are these temperatures acceptable?

I've updated my drivers to 256.96 as of this morning, but that doesn't seem to have changed anything. Anyone have an idea of what I can try to identify the issue? Are there some benchmarking tools I can use to narrow down the list of possibilities?

Computer is:
i5 750
EVGA P55 LE
EVGA GTX 470 (not overclocked)
4GB Corsair DDR3 1600
OCZ 700SXS PSU

 

[jdjbuffalo]

Your temps are fine.

What do you mean when you say "choppy"? Do you mean everything is really slow and you're only get a few frames a second or do you mean there are artifacts, tearing and other graphical anomalies?

If it's slow (low FPS) then give us more details. What resolution are you using? What games are you playing? What settings are you using (Medium, High, Ultra etc.)?

If it graphical anomalies then you've probably got a bad video card.

 

[AFurryReptile]

Could be totally unrelated to your video card. Maybe it's malware. What does your CPU load look like?

 

[PFCWintergreen]

Found out what the issue is -- the CPU fan wasn't spinning. Nothing was blocking it, but it wasn't turning. Gave it a slight poke and now it's going just fine. Thank god it didn't burn up ...

 

[Devilpapaya]

Found out what the issue is -- the CPU fan wasn't spinning. Nothing was blocking it, but it wasn't turning. Gave it a slight poke and now it's going just fine. Thank god it didn't burn up ...

heh, your BIOS didn't warn you about a CPU fan failure? My bios won't even try to boot (without severe coaxing) if there isn't a fan installed/running.

At anyrate, grats on getting it working.