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Throttling Problem with my laptop... please help!

M

mwelling12

n00b
Joined
Dec 25, 2006
Messages
30
I have had the laptop with the below specs for the past 3 years. Within this period, this laptop has had the particular problem I am about to describe the entire period. I did not have the knowledge to figure out the issue until recently. I mention this because involving the retailer or manufacturer is no longer an option.

T7200 Core2Duo at 2.00GHz
2GB RAM
GeForce Go 7800 GTX
7200 RPM HD
Windows XP SP3

Now, the issue. When I am running certain 3D intensive games (Oblivion comes to mind, as does Blood Bowl in which I have run into the issue most recently), they will start and run fine for a while. All of a sudden, though, the game will slow to a crawl, the FPS probably dropping down to around 1-5 fps. Alt-tabbing out, waiting a bit, then going back in will often solve the problem, only for it to happen soon again. I can also recreate the issue by running ATI Tool and FurMark together for between 5-10 minutes.

I have assumed this is an overheating problem, so I have purchased a cooling pad for my laptop. I have added arctic silver 5 to the video card and CPU, and have utilized the laptop's special fan feature (which will sometimes postpone, or even occasionally prevent the issue from coming up, but not always).

Now, the strange part. I have monitored my video card temps with Rivatuner, along with all clock and memory speeds for the GPU. When this issue happens, the GPU temp is usually around 80C. The strange thing is when the FPS slows, the clock speeds all remain unchanged!

I have also monitored the CPU temps and speeds when this occurs. It does not appear the CPU is throttling down either, and the temps are in an acceptable range. I have NEVER received a system warning for my temps.

If anyone has any idea what may be causing my problem, I would greatly appreciate your help. I am absolutely stumped at this point.

EDIT: And just so no one thinks to suggest it, I've cleaned out my laptop of dust, blowing it all out with compressed air. No change.
 
Last edited:
I think you already guessed it, heat.
Clock the gfx card and/or CPU a bit slower, it will not get so hot and will have slightly better heat tolerance too.
That will hopefully keep you going.

Its worth knowing that when silicon is run too hot for too long, it will develop new paths that conduct electricity significantly, effectively damaging the chip.
This causes the chip to run hotter.
If this has happened, theres nothing much more you can do other than keep the surroundings/air cooler and make sure the fan/heatsink is operating well.
 
Thanks, I'll try to lower the clocks on both a bit. I don't understand, though, how the applications slow down without the clocks being visibly affected; as I wrote, I could not detect a change in clock speed in either the CPU or the GPU.

Can anyone explain this?
 
Due to the heat, the chip will malfunction and some operations will result in errors.
If the errors are trappable (can be caught), the operation can be performed again, thus slowing down the processing.
When the errors are not trapped, they may become apparent by graphical glitches, strange gameplay behaviour etc.
They can also result in a crash.


You wont see any throttling until you hit the throttling temperature, that is extremely hot.
You arent anywhere near that.
 
Tom's Hardware had a video back from 2001 where they showed what happened on screen when they removed the heatsink off a processor while playing a game. Pretty interesting. Results were exactly as Nenu described.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y39D4529FM4

Similar situation here where heat is the main issue. (Obviously not as extreme of course.)
 
Very interesting video. The first instance shown, where the game slows down considerably only to pick back up after the heatsink is replaced seems to be exactly what happens to me. I only wish I knew this back when I got my laptop 3 years ago; I would have sent it back for replacement.

Oh well, I'll remember for the next purchase, and will try clocking lower. Any suggestions on how much lower I should clock them? Do you think I should also lower the vcore?

Thanks!
 
My laptop does the same although it rarely goes back to full speed. I never found a solution but it was pretty hot at the time - during normal weather it was fine.

In the end it just encouraged me to build a desktop earlier than originally planned lol.
 
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