NVIDIA GeForce GT 220 problems!

[LoneEagle]

I am running Windows 7 32-bit on a NVIDIA GeForce GT 220, with an AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition 3200 Mhz Processor, and 4GB of RAM. I just recently reinstalled my operating system, and I noticed that now, whenever I play a game, the game runs very smoothly for about 3-4 minutes, and all of the sudden starts chopping really badly. Its not a normal lag, its more like it goes really slow for about 1 second, and then goes back to normal speed for about a half a second, and then returns to slow for another second. This process repeats, and doesn't stop until I shut the game down. It will even still do it if I exit out to the main menu. Even when I'm typing, the text is lagged. I think I remember this being an issue when I installed Windows 7 the first time, but I can't remember how I fixed it. And yes, I have updated my drivers, and updated Windows to the most current version. This is in no way related to the speed of my machine, because I will even notice a little bit of it when I play games that are over ten years old, like Serious Sam (random example from games that I tested). Has anybody else experienced this problem? Thanks in advance to everyone who helps out.

[urbex]

Your card is probably overheating. Open up your PC and dust it out.

[HellsMaster]

I had a gigabyte GT 220 OC 1gb and i never had this problem