Has my mobo gone bad?

[darthjoe]

Strange problem I've run into over the past week and a half or so. My current setup:

Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3
E4300 o'clocked to 3.0ghz
2.0gb Transcend DDR2 800 ram
8800 GTS 320mb
Corsair 520Watt PS
2 24" monitors running at 1920x1200.

This system was built in Apr '07.

Everything was running smoothly until a few months ago, I noticed that my system would randomly lock up when watching a DVD and playing a game at the same time (usually WOW or COD4). Didn't think much of it until about 2 weeks ago, I started have in-game issues with WOW. Specifically, my FPS dropped considerably. I used to run 60fps with all settings maxed. Now I can barely get 30fps with all of the settings dropped down. I'm getting no better than 12-14FPS in COD4. Funny thing is, I only get a performance hit when the card is trying to draw graphics at a distance (i.e., out towards the horizon). If I'm in a building, or change to a top-down view, I'm back at 60fps.

I thought it was a video card issue - replaced mine with a buddy's 8800GTS. Same problem.
Replaced my ram with 2GB of Gskill 800. Same problem.

I read through the thread about latency issues and Gigabyte boards, but never saw my board mentioned (I guess it's too old), and I'm at work right now so I can't test it out.

So, does it sound like the mobo is giving out? If so, can anyone recommend a good replacement around the $100 range? Thanks for any help.

Edit: Same problem on both 32-bit Vista, and XP with SP2. Ran registry cleaner, Ad-aware, and Kaspersky. Problem still persists.

 

[iBPJohn]

What are you temps?

 

[darthjoe]

Processor runs at about 50C and Video card at 70C.

 

[iBPJohn]

I assume that's at load?, have you tried backing down your overclock to see if that helped with the issues?

 

[toronado97]

Wow dude, I'm having eerily similar problems to yours. Reformatted windows and WoW suddenly pulling 15 fps instead of 60+. Seems like the entire system is bogged down, takes forever to open drives up and search for files, I have to wait 20 or 30 seconds when copying files for it to "prepare to transfer", random explorer lockups and crashes, and several other very odd things going on. Reformatted multiple times, have tried different hard drives, even different versions of Windows and I'm still having problem. Considering we are both running damn near identical motherboards I think we may have a culprit here. I've had mine since April-ish of last year.

 

[darthjoe]

iBPJohn

No...I haven't backed off the overclock yet as I'm wondering if I back off the processor cycles, then the fps hit will be due to lack of cpu power.

Toronado97

Wow...that is eerily odd. I was really hoping this was a video card or ram issue, however, after replacing both components and having the same issue, I'm coming to realize the mobo just may be giving out.

Anyone else have a similar type of problem happen to them before?

 

[Mustanggt]

Try updating punkbuster, I had same problem with Asus P5B Deluxe when i was at 460 and up FSB ,droped my overclock down to 425 fsb and fixed problem. COD4 was not even playable for me . I pushed my asus to 490 FSB and ran prime95 for hours fine but it would not play COD4 without low FPS.