Lag spikes but unknown cause?

[Fulcrum888]

Hey all guys,

I have a friend that recently upgraded to this system:


AMD Athlon 64 X2 +6000
2GB RAM DDRII
ATI Radeon HD 4850
430 Watt Antec PSU

However, when he wants to play Team Fortress 2 or Trackmania, he gets very annoying lagspikes of 20 FPS, otherwise he gets a nice and stable 150 FPS.

The friends suggests that this is due to some CPU temperature instabillity. However, his cooling makes sure the CPU is idle @ 18°C and when working @ around 45°C.


Do you guys know any fixes? I recommended him downloading the latest AMD CPU drivers and ATI/AMD GPU drivers.


Thanks in advance,

 

[Fragrag]

It's me, I'm the guy in the OP.

Anyways, I'll chime in what I did. I've already did this guide. No change yet. I tried a more recent game, the CoD4 demo and it has the same lagspikes. I decided to disable one core and it turns out that didn't help anything at all.

Anyways, something quirky I noticed. While playing TF2 in windowed mode so I can monitor the temperature of the cores, I noticed when a lagspike happened, it always occured at 30°C, give or take one degree. During the spike, the temperature dropped to a 22°C before going back up to 28°C, afterwards the game played smoothly until the core once again reached 30°C, then it all started again.

 

[Fragrag]

Message I posted on Something Awful which goes more into detail.

Problem description: During gaming, I get periodic spikes of low FPS. The game would be running at 150FPS but very often it will drop to 10FPS for several seconds to jump back up. This problem has been noticed in all games I have on the computer:
Team Fortress 2 (i.e. Source Engine)
Trackmania Nations Forever
Call of Duty 4 SP Demo

While testing Team Fortress 2 in windowed mode, I noticed the spikes coincide when one of the cores hit around 30°C. When that happened, the temperature would suddenly drop to 20°C. Once the spike stopped after several moments, the temperature would rise to around 26°C and keep on steadily rising until it once again hits around 30°C, when it will drop to 20°C again.

Starting up my computer with a single core, the problem persisted. Setting affinity to a single core also did not help a bit.

Attempted fixes: I applied these fixes. None of them worked.

Recent changes: It's a brand new computer as of yesterday.

--

Operating system: Windows XP Professional

System specs:
ASUS M2N-MX SE Plus
AMD Athlon 6000+ X2 64b
Gigabyte Radeon HD4850
2048MB RAM
Antec Earthwatts PSU 430W

 

[Fantastik]

I don't know if this has anything to do with it, but my new setup does the same.I have the same motherboard as you. i know its not an answer but i just wanted to add that

 

[Fragrag]

Then you're in luck, because I have fixed my problem. Basically our motherboard doesn't support the AMD 6000+ Athlon 3.1Ghz version. So you either have to underclock or buy a new motherboard. I opted for underclocking. However, the latest versions of BIOS does not contain the underclocking utility we need: AMD Overclocking Configuration.

You'll have to rollback your BIOS. You can download the older BIOSes on ASUS' website. I'm using 0209 at the moment. The method to rollback should be somewhere in your motherboard manual.

 

[toniox2]

hey fragrag i have the ASUS M2N-MX SE Plus and the AMD 6000+ 3.1GHz.
and im going to underclock the cpu because the problem lagspikes in games

at what coreclock speed you underclocked your 6000+



sorry for the bad english