When gaming FPS is all over the place for no clear reason.

Hi I have a fairly new computer with 2 gigs of ram a 7500 LE turbocache nvidia graphics card.

When I play games like guild wars, half life 2 deathmatch and counter strike source my FPS is very jumpy. For example on GW everything will run smooth for a short period at about 60 fps then suddenly drop to 30 and sometimes below. I cant understand the problem and would be very grateful if someone could come up with a solution. Thank you :)

As the action on the screen gets more and more intense, your frame rates will drop. For example: In GW, you were probably getting 60 fps with nothing much going on. When you were out with your group taking on a mission with tons of enemies around, this is probably when your frames dropped. Same with CS:S. At the start in the buy menu, you will get great frames. When two people are shooting at you and you're shooting back, there is more to process and your computer won't handle it so easily.

I dont think that it has much to do with more action going on because say if I am on GW and fighting people it can still stay at 60 FPS

Even when there is nobody around the FPS still drops very low and causes the computer to slow down and kind of freeze for a second.

You also might want to check for any processes running the background, turn off any unecessary programs so that the game can have all the CPU it needs.TUnified

After hearing what you recently said sn4k3_64, then it probably is due to something in the background. Anti-virus or anti-spy/ad running in the background at times? If that's the case open your antiviral protection and schedule it to run only when you run it manually instead of automatically running at set intervals. Also these are online games you're mentioning so do run your antispyware. Not only will they (spyware) eat bandwith but they'll eat processing power.

You really don't need to ask permission to post a hardware related question in a hardware related public forum. Of course you can post again, and I will try to continue to help as much as possible.