Have a M15x pretty much max specs having issues please help

[Born For PvP]

I have upgraded my Alienware m15x to 16gb ram i7-920xm and a 7970m and read people playing games on ultra and high all the time getting 50-60fps. My computer can barely get 30fps while playing ARK on low settings. I have it on a custom 140cfm cooling fan, clean it out regularly of dust, and constantly clean out unwanted programs shredding them properly with restarts. My Hard drive is 7 years old and when running pretty much any program it reads 100% usage. I have reformatted it twice in those years. I have as of today done amd and intel complete driver wipes and started from scratch with the drivers hoping for an improvement but not seeing much am now turning here. Is it possible my hard drive is slowing my computer down that much? When looking at the overclock settings for ARK in Radeon settings i see the gpu and cpu go up to around 450mhzGPU 300mhz cpu then they fall back to 0, then repeat. is that an issue? Hope I have provided enough details to get some answers

 

[Cmlalibe]

How much space is available on your Hard Drive, is it almost full.
Also, with a 7 years old hard drive im assuming its a 5400 rpm model which is slow to begin with. Im guessing that your games are all saved on this old hard drive. While the 7970m certainly isnt top of the line anymore you should be getting better FPS. The 100% usage is probably where your issue is coming from.
Although Im not totally familiar with ARK, i believe it's just one giant map correct? This means lots of loading from where the game is saved. A slow or full HDD could easily cause these FPS Drops.

 

[Born For PvP]

So when i first start a game my gpu and cpu will hit around 1200mhz then go back down to the 450mhz and 300mhz. I have tried re enabling my Bios in GPU-Z but nothing. when i go to CPU-Z i see my perf levels of 0,1,2 my perf level 1 is a core clock of 850mhz can i fix these perf levels? the other 2 are the 450mhz and 300mhz core clocks.