G73JH Degraded Performance

I did not notice this before about this week

In two different games this happens (Starcraft 2 and Team fortress 2)

Game plays fine most of the time with visible FPS at 60
In pretty regular intervals of about 10-15 minutes, game slows to about 20 FPS for 30 seconds then goes back to normal

does not change with the graphics settings so I guess it has to be running out of memory? but i lowered my max decal limit in tf2 and there is no change

It uses ATI mobility radeon hd 5870 GPU, Intel i7 processor, and 8GB RAM on win7x64

i thought on teamfortress 2 it was normal because steam is always really stupid as a background process but it does it in SC2 with steam not running. I even get it when i set my game to "above normal" priority in task manager

i got the newest bios (213) as well as catalyst 11.2 for graphics driver

maybe i just noticed it at the same time but this seemed to start when i got windows updated last week to service pack 1

also it has the same effect when i have twinturbo mode on or off, and also have the power plan set to "high performance" or "power4gear high performance"
im not so sure sc2 or tf2 are improved by these

 

I blame entropby. You should be familiar with the concept.

 

defrag says it wont help performance significantly

 

You may want to try disabling Catalyst AI

 

theres no option to disable it in 11.2

I read after a google search that setting the texture filtering to highest quality instead of performance disables AI