cpu fan question

[brian76]

I'm wondering if I should be worried. When playing civ4 my cpu fan runs at incredibly high speeds, often surging between high and ultra speed, I can hear the fan from my living room (which was a big surprise to me). As soon as I hit the "windows" button, or hit alt-tab, to go to desktop, the fan almost instantly goes back to idle.

I have done several searches regarding this, and have read alot of posts about civ4 burning out video cards, and overheating computers. I have 3 extra case fans, and I am a smoker, but in my own defense, I keep the computer pretty clean, although some places are hard to get to, even with a qtip.

I had a hard time running the game when it first came out, couldn't play above a small map, or it would get so choppy that is was unbearable, but the newest patch fixed most of those problems, and I can play on "medium" settings and hugh world with only minor slowdowns in late game (the tradeoff, it seems, is the newly acquired jet engine the update put into my cpu fan).

Basically my question is: do I need to be worried about the amount the fan is running? I've tried to find some program on my computer to moniter the cpu temp, haven't looked for a program online yet. Oh, and btw, civ4 is the only game that this happens (went back and played doom3 and aoe3 (although I don't think those are as demanding as civ4))

Short description of my pc (don't know if it'll help)
Intel P4 530 (3.0 GHz, 1MB Cache, 800MHz FSB, HT)
Abit AG8 i915 PCI-E board
2 GB DDR-400 PC3200 RAM (Dual Channel??)
PCIE Nvidia Geforce 5750 256MB

I'll try and attach my task manager (again, don't know if it helps, just trying to give enough info to help)

 

[auldian]

That's it's running is good and, in short term, it's not a reason to worry. This game is very demanding on your CPU so it's generating more heat. Many systems now modulate fan speeds to reduce power consumption and/or noise. If it stops, well, your computer should beep and turn off quickly I'd hope; you may notice a pronounced "grinding whirr" quality for a day or two prior. Most other games are going to require much less CPU work and hence, less heat is being produced.
www.newegg.com and other stores have 3rd party fans that sometimes are more efficient coolers and quieter.
I just googled and found http://www.heatsink-guide.com/content.php?content=faq.shtml which looks to have a lot of data on the subject if you're interested.

 

[brian76]

thanks for the reply auldian! I enjoyed reading the site(s), let's me know how easy it is to fall out of date with information LOL I don't know what qualifies as a "grinding whirr", might sound like that at high speeds, anyway, gonna go ahead and replace it, better safe than sorry.

downloaded motherboard manager 5.0, only to find out abit boards past 2004 are not supported, I have not been able to find a monitering program that works with the uGuru firmware on my Abit board

abit's site was no help, but it is funny to read the english translations

 

[Xerol]

I have the same heat problem with my laptop. When the fan goes into overdrive, the game slows to the point where it's unplayable (0.5-2fps, compared with mid-20s normally), so I have to quit and wait for it to cool down. Unfortunately, Dell's laptops aren't exactly designed with cooling in mind; I've had mine propped up on CD cases with a fan blowing over the harddrive to keep that from overheating for the last 3 months.

 

[Velvet-Glove]

I don't think you need worry too much about your fan activity providing the CPU remains well within acceptable temperature limits, quite honestly. The fan/s ramping up in speed are doing what they are supposed to when the CPU is working hard.

For what it's worth, I have a 4 month old ABIT motherboard and use the uGuru monitoring utility (a floating, semi-transparent toolbar thingy), to keep an eye on overall CPU temperature, especially late on in games and on a standard map or larger, and think this is perfectly adequate as something for me to visually monitor every so often. For real peace of mind I have set my BIOS to turn on an audible alarm at a certain temp and to switch off at a slightly higher temp (both well within the maximum recommended temp for my type of CPU, I'm not taking any chances!) - I don't care if I'm in the middle of a game if this should happen, the wellbeing of my PC is far more important to me. Bear in mind that I have deliberately built a near-silent PC with a lot of passive cooling elements and very few, slow moving, fans so I have to be aware of how well it is coping, especially when under stress. In four months of use the overheating alarm has only gone off once (it was Civ4 that did it!) so I think I have got the quiet cooling system pitched about right. I can live with the occasional alarm for the sake of a blissfully quiet PC.

If the fan noise is excessive you could perhaps look into fitting a larger CPU fan that will spin at slower speeds (same airflow but much quieter operation).