i3-2348M throttle or not ?

[insanqta]

Hello guys.. a friend of mine have a problem with his i3-2348M.. he is playing CS:GO and hes getting arround 90-120 fps.. and after awhile it drops arround 15-50. I believe its cuz of cpu throttling, can he make something to prevent this ? 😛 And yes he is using some kinda cooling table 😛
Can he set the i3 to lower clock speed to prevent throttling. Sorry for the newb questions but.. we are not much into hardware thats why im asking you

 

[Goldengoose]

Sounds like temperature to me as well. Generally restrictions on hardware are felt from the start, they don't tent to 'slow down' as the game continues on.

I'd also sugggest checking background programs. You don't have you defragger/virus scan/windows updates set for certain times do you? perhaps these are interupting your game.

Perhaps he's been alt-tabbing out whilst dead - he might be getting more and more browser tabs open in the background. Alt-tabbing out can also cause some strange issues with games which require a program restart.

 

[IInuyasha74]

Limiting the CPU speed is easy, you can do that in power management, but are you sure it is the CPU? Typically i3 CPUs stay pretty cool. I would tend to think it might be the GPU more.

 

[insanqta]

So.. he says in HWinfo CPU clock is not changing.. also we looked at the GPU clock.. which is not changing aswell.
Im now alittle confused.. his cpu and gpu are arround 70% load. And he is getting huge fps drops.. when he tab to desktop and back to game his fps jumps from 30 to 100 again for awhile. Whats going on :S any ideas. My only idea was throttling..

 

[IInuyasha74]

Sorry, should of said this sooner. Get a program called MSI Afterburner instead of Winfo. It lets you monitor everything in game, so you can know the clock speeds, temperature, usage, FPS, etc. without needing to go to the desktop. When you alt-tab to the desktop, all of these things could shoot down once the game is minimized as the load decreases.

 

[insanqta]

Yes MSI afterburner was the first we used.. before even post in forums
The data was same GPU 50-60%
CPU = 50-80%

 

[IInuyasha74]

Yea that is my preferred one. And what are your temps exactly? If they are getting into the 80C area or higher then they likely are throttling.

 

[insanqta]

Where can we see the temperature on which cpu will throttle.. are there any settings we should check ?

 

[IInuyasha74]

In Afterburner, go to "Settings", "Monitoring"
There is a list of different GPU, CPU, and RAM hardware that can be monitored, most of it is by default. Clicking any of the hardware listed in the scroll box, then at the bottom below the scroll box check "Show in On Screen Display"

Best you do it with the vRAM and system RAM also. Then you can see all these things while playing the game to know. It is possible that you are having a RAM bottleneck of some kind, or a heat bottleneck, or if you are playing online could be some sort of network connection issue.

 

[insanqta]

i3-2348M, gt 710M 8 gigs of ram.. i cant understand what is happening 😀 i3 shouldnt have problems with CS GO

 

[IInuyasha74]

haha well the i3 isn't the problem. Sorry to say your graphics card is too weak to run that game really. Its surprising you manage to get 90FPS at any point, let alone that being the average.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-710M.84746.0.html

There are some benchmarks of that GPU playing games. Most newer games it can only play with lowest settings and low refresh rate. I know the capabilities of it well, cause my laptop has the GT 620M, which is identical. I have mine overclocked pretty well and it shouldn't be said that cannot be used to play games. It certainly can, but the performance is fairly low, and new games are hard to play if at all possible.

In addition, this GPU can have RAM bottleneck at times. It only has a 64-bit interface and it is capable of making use of quite a bit more bandwidth than it has. Likely what is causing your bottleneck is this.

 

[insanqta]

Thanks for the help mate.. i believe he needs new desktop machine in order to play CS:GO.. I've told him.. but he didnt listen to me 😀

 

[IInuyasha74]

No problem.

Yea a desktop certainly would be a better option. Laptops are great for portability but unless you go in the really expensive high-end range they aren't much for gaming outside of lite gaming. If he doesn't want to budge on it, he could try a little overclock. Mine didn't have an issue with it. I got about a 40% increase in some games. Its a little risky, the added heat has potential to kill the system, but if the temps are below 70C then I think he has a good chance of getting out without harm. MSI Afterburner has all the functions needed to do it, just know the risks first.