Alienware m17xR3 Nvidia GeForce 460m FPS issues (Not Throttling?)

Hello, and thank you for your attention.

For a long time now I've been struggling with my computer, trying to fix a very serious problem. Frequently in all sorts of games, regardless of my graphics cards settings, every few minutes I get a serious fps drop, and in between smaller, slight ones. It always recovers, but seems to slowly be getting worse. I can't really tell at this point, but it's frustrating to no end. I've tried setting things in the nvidia control panel, playing with all the options, but this doesn't help. I've ran GPU-Z, and I never go over 63 temp-wise and the load never drops (roughly 50-60) when in-game and stays pretty stable despite my obvious issues. Recently, as well, I tried updating my BIOS as per Dell's suggestions to A12 and now it seems my computer overall has gotten worse? A lot more stopping when I open things and slowdown than it used to have, and several frustrating clean installs of my nvidia drivers have done nothing. At this point, (even with a cooling pad as per a lot of suggestions, which I might have believed was helping but really wasn't? I'm not sure.) I've lost track of my boot disk so I can't even do a fresh install. Am I just out close to $2,000 after two-ish years, or is there some solution? I'm at the end of my ropes with this. Thank you for indulging my frustration.

Here's my GPU-Z log from a brief session of gameplay.

View attachment GPU-Z Sensor Log.txt

EDIT: I *just* noticed the memory controller load drops drastically at the points I mentioned. The hiccup towards the start with the load was an Alt+Tab to check the GPU-z. What does that mean, exactly?

Took some screenshots in Nvidia Inspector.



Above while not playing.



Above while playing. I had to Alt+Tab to screenshot, so it might not be perfectly indicative

 

Memory components could be going bad on the graphics card.. Might need a replacement.

 

Interesting idea. Does anybody else have any suggestions?

Still looking for help with this. Now, every once in a while, my computer freezes for a few seconds and plays a revving noise like it's about to BSOD but then just keeps going like nothing happened.

 

Are you still under warranty, perhaps? If you are, call them and tell them what you have done and what your issues are. At the very least they should swap the card...

 

Have you checked your CPU temps while playing? Use HWinfo64 and post your temps after one of those FPS drops.