I haven't changed much in the way of software on my machine and now it is struggling to play games it once could play...

I guess everything degrades in theory and will eventually break, but that's entirely irrelevant since a broken CPU will malfunction, generally speaking CPUs don't "degrade" in the sense that they perform worse over time. Maybe if it has some sort of clever boost algorithm it will not reach the highest clocks it did when brand new, but that would be a minor performance drop and not something you're likely to notice in actual use anyway, plus I'm not actually sure any CPU on the market right now will dial back its boost in response to degradation, most likely they will attempt to boost as normal and simply malfunction, as I've said. In any case things like CPU clock can be monitored easily, you can just look at what clock it's running at and see if it's in the normal range.

If you're seeing 100% CPU usage then something is running which is using up all your CPU time. Some games themselves will use old CPUs 100% and potentially perform poorly. In today's world just because a game ran fine years ago doesn't necessarily mean it will run fine today because games get updates and the game itself changes. This can simply mean that the devs fuck up and the game just plain runs worse, or it can get gameplay/graphics upgrades which make it more demanding, bigger levels, more enemies and so on.

did you try cleaning the dust inside the computer

you probably have some cryptominer virus running in the background
The point of this malware is that you're not supposed to know it's there

Next time use sqt to post stupid questions, thanks :)

They do degrade but you won't feel it. You could feel it if you overclocked and it becomes unstable at some point.

No it's a ploy by the Jews called planned obsolescence. Never update your drivers. There is code in them that slows it down on purpose so you have to buy a new one for no actual real reason.

its called a computer virus

1: Yes, this CPU has degraded SIGNIFICANTLY in performance since release because of en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(security_vulnerability). There are means to disable the mitigations, but essentially Intel released a flawed CPU with security vulnerabilities and you have to choose between having security or launch performance

2: CPUs can degrade in performance due to thermal paste losing conductivity as it dries out and dust clogging the ventilation of the computer. You need to clean it and re-paste to bring the thermal performance back to peak

3: Other software on your computer, especially malware, CAN impair computer performance and you can clear all that out by reformatting. Even OS upgrades to an extent will impact performance, but probably not to a significant degree.

Anyways, overwhelmingly the performance decline is probably caused by spectre/meltdown patches. So if you want to get it as close to launch performance as possible:
>clean your computer of dust
>clean/apply fresh thermal paste to the CPU
>reformat the computer
>Disable spectre/meltdown mitigations (I don't have a guide handy, I know there's at least 4 different mitigations)

For what it's worth, I would recommend a new computer. A 4670k for a gaming machine, that's getting a little long in the tooth these days.

Also yes CPU's do literally degrade over time, but only to a very minor degree, and they should still be able to perform to stock spec for years and years. AMD Zen2 built on TSMC 7nm and more modern processes are more vulnerable to this degradation than older chips like 4670k built on Intel 22nm, but yes the CPU should have marginally degraded turbo performance but I'm talking like a percent or two here.

youtube.com/watch?v=ZAww0c2m-ks&feature=emb_logo

Try reinstalling you operating system completely. It is a pain, but doing it after 5 years or so really can breath new life into your system. Also, try using linux or an older version of windows, New versions of windows have more processes and use more ram by default.

i bet you felt smart after getting the i5 instead of i7

I don't think it's dust/thermals because I have coretemp running and the cpu doesn't go over 60C.
OS: Windows 10
CPU: i5 4670K
it was generally fine about 6 months ago. For example, I launched fortnite after a year of not playing it and it stutters and drops frames to an unplayable extent. Dead by Daylight ran fine about a month or two ago even and now it stutters and drops frames if too much is happening on the screen.
I think just other ambient processes. I see the NT kernel using a lot (15%-20%) during some spikes.
I haven't seen any signs of this but I will try some antivirus scans or something to see if that's it
Thank you for the suggestions and breakdowns. I am building a new computer right now so hopefully I will be beyond this soon. I'll see if disabling spectre/meltdown patches helps (just to know, I imagine it's not worth keeping them off just for gayming) and finding something I can use to monitor cpu freq

>still running intel after security mitigations
oh no no no no no no no no no

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