Periodic severe FPS Drops

[Palamabron]

So I've been playing Skyrim for a couple of weeks and this issue has been persistant, but hard to nail down. Doesn't seem to change at all with higher or lower settings in-game.

 

For the most part Skyrim runs alright (30-40 FPS, occasionally dropping to 20ish in some scenes), but on a regular basis it will take a huge FPS hit and run at 2-4 FPS for a few minutes then return to normal. The game may run for an hour or more without further issues or just five minutes. Some users have reported that alt-tabbing resolves similar issues, but I haven't noticed much of a difference between that and just waiting it out.

 

System Info:

 

System: Vista (32 bit)

 

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 6000+ 3.12 GHz

 

ASUS M3A78-EM Motherboard

 

GPU: ATI Radeon HD 4670

 

RAM: 4GB

 

 

I'm reasonably sure this is a hardware issue as the fan always speeds up just after performance returns to normal. I'm also confident that it is not related to in-game quality settings as the issues is the same running on high or as low as possible. Skyrim is currently running on Medium/High settings with a few mods (4GB LAA, ENBSeries, and a couple of re-textures). Catalyst has AA and AF set to run on application settings. Started with 11.11 and since updated to 11.11c, not that it should make much difference with a Radeon HD 4xxx series card. I've changed a few BIOS settings as well to no particular effect one way or another (just turning on cool'n quiet tech etc, no overclocking).

 

Sounds like others are having similar issues with newer ATI/AMD hardware as well, but I have yet to find any fixes.