gta 4 used to run smooth, suddenly its laggy 5fps!

i haven't installed any hardware or uninstalled anything.
i've restarted the computer to see if it was extra processes that's taking up the memory but its still laggy.
the game used to run fine on my new desktop computer i set up.
it has AMD athlon II x3 CPU and HD 5770 GPU.

sorry it's not a laptop i'm talking about here, i was hoping i can get some answers like:

maybe my CPU is going bad already?

 

GPU downclocking from heat? And you will probably need to make a topic over at Desktopreview.com, as this is not notebook related. Registration may be required as well.

 

wow you were right on the money.
i was messing around with the power saver / balance / high performance settings this morning after i found out about it for the first time.

i know the best thing to do for laptops is to set it to 'balance' because it will adjust according to what im doing, but for the desktop, i guess theres no reason to set it to balance.

thanks for the reply.
ill set it back to default, which was high performance.

 

Performance back up?

 

yeah its smooth again.
desktops dont need to be set to power save modes or balance modes...