Questions about my M18x R2

[Georgie]

Hello everyone, I bought this alienware M18x R2 in january of 2013. Im no expert in computers but i have built a desktop around 10 years ago. Ive only been playing diablo 2 since i bought this laptop (i know....) and im the type to stick to what i know. Anyways fast forward to 2015 and ive been playing skyrim and far cry 4. I finnaly figured out how to display framerates and on ultra in skyrim its runing around 40fps but as soon as i get some action it drops to 25-30.

In far cry 4 its basically the same, in ultra it runs at around 40 then when theres action its drops below 30 even sometimes even slower. I set far cry to LOW and even then it runs around 60 but sometimes (often) drops to 15-20 fps. sometimes even slower...

Am i doing something wrong??

Also how do I find out what hard drives i have? I know i have 2 (one solid state and one regular).
Also how do i know what RAM i have(pretty sure its DDR3)

Please help as this laptop cost me around 4500$ and so far its not performing better than a ps3...

Thanks.

my specs are

M18X R2
Intel core i7-3840QM @ 2.8 GHz
24 GB RAM
Dual GTX 675M

 

[MattyB]

Firstly, are your NVidia drivers are up to date? Also, does your machine get very hot? Another thing to look at is cleaning out your heatsinks. This will mean opening up your machine and checking them out. My friends GPU blew because the heatsinks were blocked with dust/fluff.
Your GPUs are getting a little older now so you won't get top performance for newer games like FC4. Skyrim should still get great FPS though so there must be an issue somewhere.
Also good to check that you are running off your GPU cards and not Intel. I'm sure you're not but you never know. Go to device manager and see what the display adapter is. Also check to make sure the cards are running in SLI in the Nvidia Control panel.