FPS kills faster than a bullet
The game started to CTD (crash to desktop) on me lately. Before that it seemed that the game was getting heavier and heavier and FPS was slowly going down. There wasn’t good explanation why it was happening. Everything had been the same for year(s). The change in gameplay was actually so small, that I hardly noticed any difference in normal play. Only CTDs got me doubt that everything wasn’t fine anymore.
The problem turned out to be my display adapter, Radeon 9800 Pro. More specifically it was its passive cooler that wasn’t functioning efficiently anymore. The heat sink wasn’t firmly attached to the GPU because some screws had got loose.
At least that’s how it seemed.
[See how the loose heat sink could be tilted]
I’m yet to confirm that everything is working good again. Actually I already got one CTD after fixing the cooler. That might be because the GPU is already f’d up.
[next day]
It’s not the GPU. I got CTD with another R9800Pro. It could be something in the mainboard. When installing chipset drivers (Nforce3, v5.11) it throws bluescreen on ethernet drivers section. I got ethernet drivers (part of the chipset, “integrated” so to speak) installed separately, though.
Tomorrow I’ll downgrade chipset drivers to v5.10 and hope it’ll work better. Obviously there’s something wrong somewhere, beucase the game wasn’t crashing a month ago, but now it does.
[next day]
Downgrading chipset drivers didn’t help. I tried running CPU and memory stress programs, but I didn’t get the system to crash. However, right after I started CS:S and started to play I got BSOD (blue screen of death), which had never happened before. It seems that something is overheating, but when I immediately opened the chassis after the crash all components were just hand warm.
It could be that the CS:S installation itself has somehow managed to mess itself, but it’s quite long shot already. It seems that I’m stuck with low FPS for now.
4 Comments
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GHOST I have the same problem as you. At start i thought my card was broken. I took it to a service, it worked perfect on theyre PCs.
When they tryed on mine, i got the classical old strip problm + my dear 25 and less fps….
They put Windows XP from an auxiliar hdd and… IT WORKED.
They said to use partition magic and make an 20GB WINDOWS, programs and rest for games, films etc.
I haven’t made the partition yet but i will do it this weekend.
I have a 6600GT.
Comment :: March 16, 2007 @ 9:45 am
The partition didn’t helped me…
Comment :: March 18, 2007 @ 2:08 pm
Check your PSU. The 9800 is quite a power whore so check if any pins on the molex that u kept the most on your card are grayed out or burnt. If u’re using a no-name PSU it might not have enough power on the 12 volt rails (molex) so if u’re using, lets say two hdd, one or two opticals the 12v rails will get overloaded. In this case the card (biggest or second bigest consumer in your system) will draw it’s extra power from the AGP slot. In witch case try to check the 20 pin conector from the PSU to the motherboard. But before opening your computer try overcloaking your card, it might limit it’s freqvencies if it does not recieve enough power (thats the safety mechanism in nvidia cards anyway.). And use riva tuner’s hardawe monitoring to check your gpu temperature and clock speed in any 3D app.
Hope it helps
Comment :: March 18, 2007 @ 10:57 pm
Crappy PSU is reasonably good guess in this situation. It doesn’t seem to cause problems, though. I’ve got Nexus Breeze 400 (400W) [ http://www.nexustek.nl/breeze.htm ]. There are 2 opticals (cd + dvd, unfunctional) and 1 SATA HDD. I removed the opticals just to be sure. There doesn’t seem to be any effect.
It is possible that something has broken when the passive cooler on the card has been loose.
I’ve also re-installed Windows(*), which didn’t change anything. I also tried on fresh CS:S installation, just in case I had managed to mess the settings at some point (actually it seems that CS:S stores some settings in registry, so it wasn’t totally fresh install, quite long shot anyway).
I’ve also updated motherboard BIOS.
PSU is still the most reasonable cause for crashes. There could be dust inside the PSU, which is causing problems. On the other hand the chassis itself is very well protected against dust, so the chances are slight.
Anyways, FPS is still low, game crashes after an hour or two (never play that long
), something wrong, no solution.
(*) I installed russian patched ssClient to get to play Zombie mod on Contra’s servers. It somehow managed to change character set to UTF-8, which was impossible to revert. I had to go the long way eventually.
Comment :: March 19, 2007 @ 2:15 am