Pentium M and degrading performance

[Sondre]

I'm experiencing some strange behaviour on my laptop when I'm enjoying my daily quota of CivIV:

At first the game behaves quite well, but over time (approximate 10 minutes on average), performance degrades. Scrolling becomes a painful experience, city screens opens slowly, animations are not as smooth as they started out.

The strangest thing is this:
CpuZ reports that the core speed drops when the performance degrades. My cpu is a 1.8 GHz Dothan, which can adjust the multiplier to save battery. On 1.8 GHz the game experience is great. It's still ok on 1.4, 1.2 and 1.0 GHz. But on 800 and 600 MHz it becomes unbearable.

I have tried to fiddle with the graphics settings, but without luck.

CivIV is the only application the cpu throttles on, even though it's not supposed to throttle when the power cord is attached.

My specs:
CivIV patch 1.52 (never tried vanilla or another patch, had to use pakbuild on install)
Laptop based on an Aopen 1557 with:
Intel Centrino 1.8GHz (Dothan)
1024 MB RAM 333MHz
ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 (not supported by ATI, depend on aopen for drivers)
Windows XP, SP2

Any feedback greatly appreciated

 

[civ_god06]

the problem is probably being caused by the drivers coz there dated back in 2004

You could try www.omegadrivers.net and get the most up to date for the radeon card

 

[Sondre]

Drivers are now Omega 3.8.205, include new dxdiag

Thanks for suggestion, but problem remains. Any new ideas?

 

[lab-rat]

This sounds to me like your laptop is over heating. If the processor hits a certain temperature it will throttle back no matter whether the power cord is connected.

Try sitting your laptop up of the table (or where ever) to allow better airflow. Depending on the build of your lappy you may need to blow some dust out of your heatsink/fan

Cheers

 

[Sondre]

This sounds to me like your laptop is over heating. If the processor hits a certain temperature it will throttle back no matter whether the power cord is connected.

Try sitting your laptop up of the table (or where ever) to allow better airflow. Depending on the build of your lappy you may need to blow some dust out of your heatsink/fan

Cheers

If GPU chips give off more heat when used for 3D-stuff then I would consider this explanation the most probable cause. Have lifted the laptop up, and now it runs considerable longer before throtteling down. Never had this problem under full cpu load before though.

I'm not closing the case yet, need to test it more

 

[Edratman]

Try downloading a free RAM defrag program and defragging your RAM. I found that it takes multiple defrags (8 to 10)to get to maximum free RAM (I am using RAM DEF Xtreme), but I was pleasantly shocked when CIV stopped crashing/freezing/rebooting when I did the multiple defrags.

I am not geek enough to understand why the free RAM increments up using multiple defrags, but it worked for me.

 

[Sondre]

I have found a solution.

Found a nice utility to monitor and tweak temperature and multiplier of the cpu: http://www.pbus-167.com/chc_guid.htm

This showed me that the cpu overheated when playing and therefore throttled. Slowing down to 1.4GHz solved the problem, but wonder movies lagged a bit. I'll have to upgrade my other pc

Thanks for all input, helped me a lot.