cpu usage and frames

[Trippy]

hiya fellas.  have been having very low frame rates (20 max, usually around 10) as of late and was wondering if any of you had some ideas.

3 ghz pentium
ati 9700 pro
1gb ram
xp

one thing i have noticed is that AH usually only around 25% of cpu and they system is using almost the rest.  seems strange.  have run virus scan, though stupid mcaffee always scans up to a certain file (forget which, something like hp/driver) and stops.  

well, any ideas would be appreciated thanks-Trippy

[Ghosth]

Running anything in the background?

Try booting up Clean, no antiviris, no spyware, nothing.

Next, what drivers you useing on that video card?

[bockko]

EGADS! 20 fps on a p3 with that vid card? Did you build it yourself or did you buy it? You should make sure your dx is up to date; then make sure your vid card driver is up to date; then, make sure you have all updates for your os; then turn off junk like messenger, weather programs, essentially any programs you don't need. You can safely leave your antivirus running as well as your fire wall (assuming you have it). Even if you leave some power hogs like windows autoupdate on, you should see your frame rate around 75.

if you built yourself, did you install the mobo drivers?

If your a/v hangs, try disconnecting from the net and turning off all programs in your tray; then try.

make sure macafee is updated as well. If your system ran great, then deteriorated, you may have a virus, or spyware, or even need a defrag.

Ghosth makes a good point - you may have something running in background, but sure does sound like your video card driver or some other driver/software is old.

That system should smoke.

[Skuzzy]

This is not a driver related problem.  DirectX should be using between 95 and 98% of the CPU.  If it isn't then something else is taking away from the CPU.
That is where you problem is.  Virus scanners do not stop WEB sites from planting programs on your computer.  And DLL's will not show percentage of CPU utilization when they are running.
There is no easy answer to this question.  You have to find what is running and stop it.  You probably should run Adaware, which will catch most data miners, and then run SpyKiller.
SpyKiller is very agressive about finding registry items and DLL's.  It is not free, but they will do a free scan of your system.

[AKWarp]

Did you add an extra 512MB of memory recently?  (i.e. was the system fine until you went to 1GB of memory?).  If so, go to ATI's website, there is an issue with the RADEON cards and more than 512MB of system memory.

If not, and I certainly hope this is not the case, your video card might be fried.  My 9800 Pro went bonkers on me about 3 weeks after I got it.  Ran great, then I started having all sorts of issues...one of them was very low frame rates just like you have.  Are you also losing UDP a lot, or getting unexplained reboots or lockups?  I also had that which initially had me thinking something other than the video card...but in the end, it was the RADEON all along.  I returned my card to ATI via RMA and am awaiting the replacement (once I spent a week trying in vain to convince the ATI "Customer Care" people....who evidently don't speak English very well, that I had indeed performed all the little checks, updates, etc they kept telling me to do).

This may not be your issue at all, but just similar to what I recently experienced.  If you have another video card, install it in your system and see what happens.  Worse case, completely reload Windows from scratch and try that.

[Trippy]

thanks all for responses:)  problem is fixed, if curious i did find a few data miners on computer but the real culprit was mcafee.  after deleting it in the downloaded files problem was fixed and now computer works just fine, see ya in the skies