Getting fps drops in games.?

The big idea behind nice video cards is they take the work away from the CPU. An i5 is not ideal. I would bet your motherboard will accept an i7. The i7 has been out long enough now that what once cost $600 for a top CPU is probably down into the $200. You should look into this. Download your MOBO manual, see what socket and processor it takes - then do an ebay search on that type. Sort the list by price. Scroll down until you get to the ones you can afford - and then compare them to your i5. Do this every 3-4 months until you find one that gives you a SUBSTANTIAL increase in performance. You don't want to go though the pain of updating the BIOS for just a marginally better CPU.

That said, I would think an i5 with such a nice video card would work better. When you boot up the computer check to see the BIOS version - then surf to the MOBO maker's web site and see what the latest version is. Could be your MOBO was produced before the video card and its having issues shifting the workload. While you are at it - check the firmware on the video card and make sure that is up to date. If that is a Nvadia powered card and you are not running the Nvadia Experience app to keep it updated - that could be your issue.

Last is heat. As that card heats up past what it likes - it will automatically begin to throttle back performance. If it works super great when turned on but goes west after a few minutes - this could be the issue. Might be dust in the radiators on the CPU or card coolers. Could be a fan going bad. There are lots of programs that can test a video card's performance - be careful using them! I use FurMark - it is handy when you have 2 or 3 video cards and can see the performance side by side. Run FurMark or something like it and take a pic of the results with your smart phone. Then go clean the heck out of the fans and heat sinks. Go back and run FurMark again and see if you get better results. If FurMark starts the card off great and then performance drops out as card temp goes up - then you just don't have enough decent fans in the box. You might want to remove those $4 1600 rpm fans that came with it for $29 3800rpm to 5600rpm gaming fans. Heat raises - so "Push" cool in at the bottom and "Pull" hot out from the top. If your computer is not on a clean desktop - but on the floor - then set your fans opposite what is normal unless you like to clean it out every month. On a floor sitting computer - I will mount two fans, one on top of the other, to push as much air into the machine.

Are you playing on line or off line?