AustinZ Posted October 24, 2007 Report Share Posted October 24, 2007 (edited) Hello all, I've been experiencing this strange issue for a while, which occurs with just about all the system-requirement-intensive games I play these days (Civilization 4 and Half-Life 2 come to mind). The game runs beautifully when it's first loaded, and then for ten minutes or so. After that, the framerate drops tremendously and the game becomes unplayable. If I alt-tab out to the desktop and wait a while, I can go back to the game and play it just fine for another ten minutes. And so forth. I have a Dell Latitude D820 with the NVidia Quadro NVS 120M (GeForce Go 7400?) graphics card. I'm running Windows XP on a partition that has 5.5 GB free, and the machine has 2GB of RAM. I tried disabling the turbocache with RivaTuner, and it didn't improve performance. I'm getting this issue with both the stock (really old) drivers, as well as the 163.13 ForceWare drivers I got from this site (they were recommended in the Community Led Driver Recommendation thread). Does anyone have any insight as to what this might be caused by? One last thing of note: I downloaded the NVidia control panel extension that lets you adjust the performance settings and see the GPU temperature. The temperature of the GPU seems to be around 77 degrees C when the computer is idle, and I've seen it go up to 96 degrees C before while playing a game (the temperature always drops slowly after I alt-tab back to the idle level). Are these temperatures normal for a laptop GPU, or could I be experiencing some overheating issues? Thanks a lot! Edited October 24, 2007 by AustinZ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LSudlow Posted October 24, 2007 Report Share Posted October 24, 2007 The problem is heat. When your GPU gets hot enough, it throttles down to keep from being destroyed. The best solution is to get a can of compressed air and blast the dust out of the cooling fins inside one of the vents, usually on the rear panel of the case. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Felipe Posted October 24, 2007 Report Share Posted October 24, 2007 Looks like you've reached the card's core slowdown temp....you should try looking for a modded bios, or try to modify the one you have with NiBitor, then flash it... Hello all,I've been experiencing this strange issue for a while, which occurs with just about all the system-requirement-intensive games I play these days (Civilization 4 and Half-Life 2 come to mind). The game runs beautifully when it's first loaded, and then for ten minutes or so. After that, the framerate drops tremendously and the game becomes unplayable. If I alt-tab out to the desktop and wait a while, I can go back to the game and play it just fine for another ten minutes. And so forth. I have a Dell Latitude D820 with the NVidia Quadro NVS 120M (GeForce Go 7400?) graphics card. I'm running Windows XP on a partition that has 5.5 GB free, and the machine has 2GB of RAM. I tried disabling the turbocache with RivaTuner, and it didn't improve performance. I'm getting this issue with both the stock (really old) drivers, as well as the 163.13 ForceWare drivers I got from this site (they were recommended in the Community Led Driver Recommendation thread). Does anyone have any insight as to what this might be caused by? One last thing of note: I downloaded the NVidia control panel extension that lets you adjust the performance settings and see the GPU temperature. The temperature of the GPU seems to be around 77 degrees C when the computer is idle, and I've seen it go up to 96 degrees C before while playing a game (the temperature always drops slowly after I alt-tab back to the idle level). Are these temperatures normal for a laptop GPU, or could I be experiencing some overheating issues? Thanks a lot! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Sean Posted January 29, 2008 Report Share Posted January 29, 2008 Looks like you've reached the card's core slowdown temp....you should try looking for a modded bios, or try to modify the one you have with NiBitor, then flash it... I'm having the same problem with my Dell D820. It's ridiculous, if I do anything that uses DirectX my GPU temp crawls up to about 85 degrees and my computer's CPU goes to 100% pegged. Right as this happens the GPU temp starts lowering. It didn't always do this...I'm thinking a fan/heatsink contact has gone bad. I have product protection on this machine for another 1.5 years so I think I'll give Dell a call, I've done everything I can think of in software to fix this to no avail. Sean Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LSudlow Posted January 29, 2008 Report Share Posted January 29, 2008 Again, don't forget that most laptops need to have thier cooling fins cleaned out periodically. Just get a can of compressed air and blast out the fins that usually are just inside one of the cooling vents on either the side or back panel of the laptop. You should get a pretty good puff of dust. Also, it's worth noting that many lapltops really are unsuited to overclocking because of cooling issues. If you're overclocking, try backing off and see if it helps. It's also possible the cooling fan has failed. If you're running hot and not hearing some pretty loud fan noise, that very well may be your problem. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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