Alienware Gaming laptop dropping frames

[SaltyMuffin]

I have a fairly high end laptop purchased from Dell and it can run most things at max settings with no problem (at least until recently). I'm not sure what has changed, but in most games im playing it will run great, but then drop the framerate down to unplayable levels.

Is it perhaps my laptop running warm and having to allocate some resource to keep it cool? I would think if that were the case it would be constant.

I did a hardware check through dell and everything passed.

I made sure that my Nvidia settings were set to performance globally and the laptop is plugged in.

In resource manager RAM useage never gets above 25% but i've noticed odd spikes in the processor graphs, and I'm not sure what, or how to fix this. Can anyone help me? Usually I can troubleshoot, but this one has be confused. Drivers have been double checked and are up to date as well.

GeForce GTX 880M GPU

32GB of Ram

Intel i7-4910 CPU at 2.90 2.90

Running Windows Ultimate

 

[Laptop_Nerd]

Hi,

Start by updating your graphics card driver. Here are the troubleshooting steps.

- Uninstall the graphics card driver from Device Manager and in Programs and Features as well since it should have something related to NVIDIA in there as well.
- Once uninstalled download and install the latest driver from NVIDIA support site.
- Here's the link: nvidia.com/download/index.aspx
- Use the Auto Detect feature so they could give you the latest and accurate driver for your graphics card.
- Lastly reboot it once the latest driver has been installed.

And also try and do a virus/malware clean up with it as well. Here are some tips on how to.
http/www.tomsguide.com/faq/id-1691891/removing-malware-proven-completely-remove-bitcoin-mining-malware.html