FPS coming down to zero..

[rythm07dvine]

Hi everybody i am facing a serious problem.
I assembled a new pc a few monts back.The specificatons r as follows.
AMD Athlon X2 6000+
Asus M2n68-AM mothereboard
2gb DDR2 ram
250 GB Hard Disk
Nvidia 9500 gt 512 MB DDR2 GPU
PSU 450 watts
Monitor -Dell

whenever i play any game ,left 4 dead,assassins creed,pure,crysis,farcry 2,gears of war, and all other ..the frame rates comes down to zero after every 3-4 minutes of gameplay.This makes gameplay impossible.it takes abt 10 seconds to come back to normal then i can play again till the frame rate comes down to zero again.cant figure out whats causing the problem.thiss problem was there since i bought the pc.
that time i had 8500 gt .i thought it might be tha graphics card so i changed it to 9500 gt but still the problem is there.
i tried with all drivers. Reformated my HDD. but no help.
I ran memtest for abt 4 hrs and it came out with zero erros.
I also changed the bios of motherboard but no help.
currently i am using xp sp 3 with all drivers properly installed.
is there anyone who can help me out of this problem.:(
thanks in advance.

[MikeP]

I'm no expert by any means, in fact I pretty noobish with this stuff. But your PSU might be a little underpowered.

I had a similar problem but my games would usually crash altogether and I'd have to reboot.

Might be something to look into but like I already mentioned I don't know a lot about PC's.

[jlreich]

Check your CPU, video card, and system temps. If you are running too hot your system will slow down. I would suspect the CPU is running hot and throttling down causing your FPS drop.

You can use HWMonitor (http://www.cpuid.com/hwmonitor.php) to check temps from withing windows. You can also look in the BIOS to see CPU and system temps.

[rythm07dvine]

ok here it is i checked hwmonitor and the detils i am giving in the txt file attached along...
i dont understand it a lot.The temp seems fine.
maybe someone can interpret the couse of the drop in frame rate in games from this report generated by hwmonitor.

[jlreich]

Oh yeah you are running way too hot. That is your problem. The CPU temp at the top should be no higher than 40C at idle. ;) At 85C you are approaching meltdown.

Check to make sure your heatsink is on correctly.

It is probably the reason everything else is running hot, even your hard drive is running hotter than it should.

Temperature sensor 0 85°C (184°F) [0x55] (CPU)
Temperature sensor 2 33°C (91°F) [0x21] (Mainboard)

AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ hardware monitor

Temperature sensor 0 49°C (120°F) [0x62] (Core #0)
Temperature sensor 1 55°C (130°F) [0x68] (Core #1)

Dump hardware monitor



Hardware monitor
-----------------------------------------------------

GeForce 9500 GT hardware monitor

Temperature sensor 0 63°C (145°F) [0x3F] (GPU Core)

Dump hardware monitor



Hardware monitor
-----------------------------------------------------

ST3250310AS hardware monitor

Temperature sensor 0 39°C (102°F) [0x27] (HDD)

[mjc]

It is hard to say for sure, without knowing exactly which sensor is which, but it seems, that if this is not under a heavy load, your CPU temps are running in the very high 40s to mid 50s C, which is definitely 'warm'...under no to light load temps should be no higher than low 40s.

Post what the BIOS says for the CPU temp...

[rythm07dvine]

In bios the CPU temperature crosses 65 c.
I am using the heatsink and fan that came with my AMD CPU
Dont know how to bring down the temperature of the CPU.Today I opened both sides of the casing and played a game for some time .The problem got postponed. The gap between the fps drop increased .now ir was dropping after 10-12 minutes of gameplay. and the temp of the cpu was also increasing gradually. henever it was crossing 60c there was a drop in frame rate.
Can anyone suggest how to cool my System.
Sorry i forgot to thank u all for helping me this far.:)

[saphalline]

The temp disparity makes this one potentially obvious.

rythm07dvine - Double-check the instructions for your CPU. Did you remove the plastic film on the thermal tape before clamping down the HSF unit? Take it apart and see if that's the problem.

[rythm07dvine]

Ok guys finally i solved the problem.....i just uninstalled my cool and quite driver ,and that did the magic .
The fan speed increased by about 500rpm and the temperature started to drop..
The driver was blocking the rpm of the cpu HSF,preventing it from running at high speed...
Thanks to u all ....a lot ..

[jlreich]

Ah, I hate CPU throttling. Unless it's a laptop that needs to run on battery a lot the first thing I do is disable it.

It would be a good idea if it worked well. But it responds way too slow for my tastes. I didn't pay a ton of cash and build my system so it will take 10 seconds for Firefox to load. :p

[saphalline]

OMG!! :eek: No wonder you were having problems!!

Those stupid "drivers" that AMD puts out are beyond useless! They are often detrimental to performance unless you have an OEM rig! All those stupid "patches" of theirs, like the ones for their CPU's so that Windows works correctly... :rolleyes: The whole point of x86 was to create a framework for hardware that would be software-independent!! Thankfully, this has spread to other areas of computers. Unfortunately, many people still seem to preach the whole idea of installing Windows patches for your software-independent hardware. :rolleyes: Have any of those people stopped to think why Linux doesn't need them? Hmmm...

If you have any other Windows "patches" that purport to "fix" non-existent problems with your AMD hardware, remove them before firing up another game.