My problem is that when a game is running in the foreground, in Full Screen mode, any applications on my second monitor (such as youtube videos, videos, not app specific) drop their frame-rate to about 2-3 FPS. It seems like some sort of power management option that I can't track down. As far as I can tell, it's not due to the GPU not being able to keep up. For instance, my PC can play League of Legends at about 280FPS when the framerate is uncapped. If i cap it at 60FPS using the in-game option, it has no affect on the performance of the background app. Summary Operating System Windows 8 Pro 64-bit CPU Intel Core i7 3820 @ 3.60GHz 42 °C Sandy Bridge-E 32nm Technology RAM 12.0GB Triple-Channel DDR3 @ 533MHz (7-7-7-20) Motherboard Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. X79-UD3 (SOCKET 0) 37 °C Graphics DELL U2713HM (2560x1440@59Hz) DELL U2713HM (2560x1440@59Hz) 1280MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 (Gigabyte) 58 °C Hard Drives 212GB Volume0 (RAID) 1863GB Western Digital WDC WD20EARS-00MVWB0 (SATA) 36 °C 1863GB Western Digital WDC WD20EARS-00MVWB0 (SATA) 34 °C Optical Drives No optical disk drives detected Audio ASUS Xonar Essence STX Audio Device Operating System Windows 8 Pro 64-bit Computer type: Desktop Graphics Monitor 1 Name DELL U2713HM on NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 Current Resolution 2560x1440 pixels Work Resolution 2560x1400 pixels State Enabled, Output devices support Multiple displays Extended, Secondary, Enabled Monitor Width 2560 Monitor Height 1440 Monitor BPP 32 bits per pixel Monitor Frequency 59 Hz Device \\.\DISPLAY4\Monitor0 Monitor 2 Name DELL U2713HM on NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 Current Resolution 2560x1440 pixels Work Resolution 2560x1400 pixels State Enabled, Output devices support Multiple displays Extended, Primary, Enabled Monitor Width 2560 Monitor Height 1440 Monitor BPP 32 bits per pixel Monitor Frequency 59 Hz Device \\.\DISPLAY5\Monitor0 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 Manufacturer NVIDIA Model GeForce GTX 570 GPU GF110 Device ID 10DE-1086 Revision A2 Subvendor Gigabyte (1458) Series GeForce GTX 500 Current Performance Level Level 3 Current GPU Clock 845 MHz Current Memory Clock 1900 MHz Current Shader Clock 1690 MHz Voltage 0.988 V Technology 40 nm Die Size 520 mm² Release Date Dec 07, 2010 DirectX Support 11.0 OpenGL Support 5.0 Bus Interface PCI Express x16 Temperature 57 °C Driver version 9.18.13.2018 BIOS Version 70.10.55.00.01 ROPs 40 Shaders 512 unified Memory Type GDDR5 Memory 1280 MB Bus Width 64x5 (320 bit) Filtering Modes 16x Anisotropic Noise Level Moderate Max Power Draw 219 Watts Count of performance levels : 3 Level 1 - "Default" GPU Clock 50 MHz Memory Clock 135 MHz Shader Clock 101 MHz Level 2 - "2D Desktop" GPU Clock 405 MHz Memory Clock 324 MHz Shader Clock 810 MHz Level 3 - "3D Applications" GPU Clock 845 MHz Memory Clock 1900 MHz Shader Clock 1690 MHz Things I've tried: 1) Updating the graphics driver 2) Setting windows power mode to High Performance 3) Reset Nvidia Global Performance settings to default