Curious drops in performance of 2011 15" MBP

[Prodo123]

Hello!

I've had my MacBook Pro for 2 years now and itms pretty much indispensable. I've grown to know its limits like the 95 degrees Celsius cap on the temperature.
But recently I've noticed a decrease in performance and temperature. It caps out now at 75, and what used to be a glorious Geekbench score of 11,000 has now beenexactly halved, to around 5,700! The computer runs fine except for the occasional Finder freezes which requires a reboot. I've tried SMC and PRAM resets which only mildly helped.

My biggest fear in this is the logic board going bad. I don't know what's wrong with it and am running the AHT at the moment with fingers crossed!

 

[powerslave12r]

Expect more sudden curious drops in performance as the Haswell MBP announcements draw nearer.

 

[Prodo123]

Expect more sudden curious drops in performance as the Haswell MBP announcements draw nearer.

That was so very helpful and constructive in solving this issue, thank you for your input.

On another note, an extended test on the AHT revealed no hardware issues at all! I'm still at a loss for what might be wrong with the computer.

Update: After a reboot I get back a good portion of the score, and I'm back to 10,000. Temperatures are back to what they used to be. Strangely enough this is with the exact same conditions as before the reboot.

 

[agaskew]

How long had it been since the last reboot?

 

[jwksmith]

Have you checked to see if any rogue tasks are running or if any tasks are taking an excessive amount of resource ?

 

[Prodo123]

How long had it been since the last reboot?

After an hour of use the computer's Geekbench score reports 7000s.

Have you checked to see if any rogue tasks are running or if any tasks are taking an excessive amount of resource ?

I have the kernel using 1.09GB of memory and 14% of CPU, com.apple.IconServicesAgent with 203.5MB and mdworker with 40% of the CPU. WindowServer is the next most resource intensive at 3% of CPU, which is nominal.

Update: With mdworker closed I got the Geekbench score back up to 10,811. I think it was indexing the backup drive that I forgot to add to the exceptions.