Dropping Framerate

N

NAiLs

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 13, 2006
Messages
139
I hope I'm tossing this in the right forum, but oh well.

I've been having a severe problem with dropping frames as of late. I want to say this problem is about 2-3 months and going. The big game that I notice it in, as I play it the most, is WoW. I'm sitting there running 60-80 FPS and suddenly my frame rate drops to 15-20 out of the blue. The same stuff is on the screen, it just drops. This makes game play horrible. Now the frame rate will come back after 30 seconds to 10 minutes, but it will only stay nice for a minute or two and go back to crap again.

I have reformatted my system about a week ago with hopes that it would fix the problem. No dice.

Now, I thought that could have been a problem with WoW itself. Not the case. I was playing some other games today and same stuff... dropping frame rates.

My system is a Dell E1705 Notebook.

2.0GHz Core Duo
256MB 7800 Go
100GB 5400RPM SATA HDD
2GB DDR2 RAM

Video settings:
2x AA
8x AF
Texture Quality - Quality (3/4)

Tweaks R Us Drivers w/ just default NVidia settings.

In Game Settings are up pretty high, but it doesn't matter. It still does it at lower resolutions and settings.

Is this just signs of a bad card or bad software? I have no idea what other good mobile drivers are out there. Dell doesn't update theirs often and NVidia doesn't even make drivers for the 7800 Go (Not the same as the 7800 GTX).... forcing me to go elsewhere.

Anyone that can chime in on this would be appreciated. I'm stumped and don't know where to look other than have Dell send me a new video card.

Thanks!

-Brian
 
That's not good. It's possible the card is overheating. Is there any way you can monitor the temperatures?
 
Yeah, there is a little "Add On" with NVidia's control panel that monitors temps. Also ik8fangui does that too.

NVidia's thing says 78*C right now as I have WoW open. I have seen it jump to 84*C while playing. Hot? I think so, but I'm not too familiar w/ GPU core temp limits. ik8fangui always said up to 68* prior to reformatting if I'm not mistaken, so I'm not sure if the NVMonitor is correct or not.

My notebook is placed on an open surface in my basement. It's a whopping 63-65*F down here.
 
Wow yes that's f***ing hot lol. No wonder you're having those problems. Perhaps do a little spring cleaning?
 
If its not the card that is causing the problem i would see if your laptop has some sort of power management that is trying to throttle everything down to save battery power. I believe most laptops have this in some form or another and maybe its just not playing nicely with WoW. Check your bios for some options and see if you can turn it off.
 
Ah yes, I totally forgot about the power management. I know I had issues when I bought the laptop because the power scheme was on portable and the processor kept down clocking. I did just double check, and it was set to Always On. Unsure why? I did change it to Home/Office as I know that always fixed problem in the past, so I will see if that fixes it now or not.

I will also double check the BIOS. I did rip apart the notebook today to clean it and put new thermal paste on the CPU, so the BIOS settings got cleared in that run. (Have to remove CMOS battery). I wanted to put new paste, if at all possible, on the GPU, but I didn't have the right size torx bit. I'm thinking it's just a thermal pad like the northbridge.

I'll let ya know.
 
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