Shepherdboy
Chieftain
Greetings All,
Well I finally think I found the problem with playing Civ 4 on my Dell Inspiron 600m. I am able to play for about 15 minutes with no problems and then the system slows to a crawl. The patch did not help and new drivers have not helped.
Over the last 6 weeks after reading post after post and trying every suggestion I could find including Harkonnen's patch, I had the idea that my machine might be overheating. Since my laptop is a Centrino machine with a Pentium M, it can throttle down the CPU when on battery. I wondered if it might also throttle down if it was overheating.
I found a great little app called SpeedFan that reports on the temperature sensors in my system. I ran Civ4 in windowed mode with this app and watched the temp for the CPU, GPU, and RAM go up, up, up. When the CPU, GPU, and RAM reached 73C, 54C, and 60C respectively, the system slowed to a crawl and the temperatures began to fall. I left the system alone for a bit and when the temps fell low enough, the system throttled back up.
After searching on the Internet for "Inspiron 600m overheating", I found several reports like this:
So...it appears that I'm dealing with a system overheating problem. I guess there's not really much I can do about it unless I want to buy a new machine, which I don't. I'm wondering if there's any way to throttle the system down myself to maybe 85% or 90% to see if I can keep the RAM from getting so hot.
Has anyone else out there experienced this same problem? Has anyone tried to throttle down their system manually? Any info would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Shepherdboy
Well I finally think I found the problem with playing Civ 4 on my Dell Inspiron 600m. I am able to play for about 15 minutes with no problems and then the system slows to a crawl. The patch did not help and new drivers have not helped.
Over the last 6 weeks after reading post after post and trying every suggestion I could find including Harkonnen's patch, I had the idea that my machine might be overheating. Since my laptop is a Centrino machine with a Pentium M, it can throttle down the CPU when on battery. I wondered if it might also throttle down if it was overheating.
I found a great little app called SpeedFan that reports on the temperature sensors in my system. I ran Civ4 in windowed mode with this app and watched the temp for the CPU, GPU, and RAM go up, up, up. When the CPU, GPU, and RAM reached 73C, 54C, and 60C respectively, the system slowed to a crawl and the temperatures began to fall. I left the system alone for a bit and when the temps fell low enough, the system throttled back up.
After searching on the Internet for "Inspiron 600m overheating", I found several reports like this:
This has nothing to do with dust clogging the fans. This problem stems from a design flaw in the 600m. Dell corrected for this flaw a long time ago by releasing a new BIOS that changed the thermal throttling of the computer. When the RAM temperature exceeds ~60°C the system bus (might be CPU multiplier + RAM multiplier) clocks itself down. It is most noticable in games after about 10-15 minutes of gaming. Gaming is impossible after this threshold is exceeded. This is a well-known issue and Dell refuses to acknowledge it to this day.
So...it appears that I'm dealing with a system overheating problem. I guess there's not really much I can do about it unless I want to buy a new machine, which I don't. I'm wondering if there's any way to throttle the system down myself to maybe 85% or 90% to see if I can keep the RAM from getting so hot.
Has anyone else out there experienced this same problem? Has anyone tried to throttle down their system manually? Any info would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Shepherdboy
