G73JW severe FPS dips in Black Ops... RMA or? HELP!!

Anyone know what the problem could be?

I installed Black Ops (The only game i have available atm) and immediately noticed the game dipping down to 10 fps at times. It doesn't seem to make sense. It plays smoothly at 60 - 70 fps, dips down to 40 fps during explosions which i assume is normal, but then suddenly when doing something simple like turning around the character in the game it will dip to 10 fps and stutter badly for a few seconds, then it resumes back to 60 fps. It does this every 20 - 30 seconds. It does this at 720p or 1080p. The performance test videos I've seen on youtube of this system playing black ops is much better than what I'm getting here.

This is on a fresh install. All I did was update directx using the updater from Microsoft. Should this be RMA'd? I bought this open box for a grand with the full warranty. It looks brand new, but I have a feeling it was returned due to this problem...

Just did a benchmark using 3DMark. Results are shown in the link below.

Result

Does everything look standard or any probs noticed?

 

Seems fine to me. Basically, black ops is terribly buggy. If you read up in the gaming forum, you'll see plenty of people with the same problem. It's not a hardware issue, it's a "black ops needs to have updates applied or it'll run terribly on anything multi-core" problem.

So install those updates. Steam does it automatically. Pirated copies don't have a patch.

 

This isn't my game (borrowed from friend) so I won't be connecting online on another machine. This might cause his license to get blacklisted, right? Can I install the patch with a valid serial, but without going online? (sorry if this is a noob question, I'm new to PC gaming)

I've got Star Wars The Force Unleashed 2 here as well, but didn't use this game to test the system since I thought it wasn't very good. However, your explanation that Black Ops is buggy has given me some relief that my laptop might be fine. I'll go install the game and report back how it runs.

Update: I just tested SW's and it runs smoothly at 1080p. It's pretty much locked in at 30fps at max settings. It appears testing the laptop using Black Ops without the patch was the worst thing I could have done to determine the performance. Thanks for your reply. Saved me a lot of further headache...