So I recently upgraded by PC, new decent motherboard, 6Mb Ram, and just waiting for the new graphics card to arrive - present to myself 
My PC runs a Quad core processors and has always been quite fast and reliable.
Recently, whilst playing Saboteur and Dirt, it has begun to stop/pause during gameplay and takes a while to get going again, which is a bit
frustrating if you're flying down a stage!
It's like it's running out of memory, but I've got plenty of that, and there's very little else running in the background - tried
turniing the AV off, didn't make any difference.
Any ideas computer guru's ?????
Are all the HeatSinks and fans clean for the CPU and Graphics Card etc.
Mine was stuttering playing Need for Speed the other week and the graphics card heatsink was completely blocked, its been fine since 
They weren't till I replaced the MB a couple of weeks ago, the thing was full of dusk, but now it's all spotless.
I have left the sides off (waiting for the new GC to come) - do you think this would have affected airflow enough to cause it to overheat? I've
put them back on now.
I hope you mean 6 gig of ram. Shut some background processes down and see if that makes any difference.
I had a similar problem where the cpu wasnt 100% seated properly once, made it overheat and step down in power to rescue itself, worth checking, and that theres enough heat paste on there.
Did the same on one of my boys computers last night. It was overheating (artefacts in gaming) so I cleaned it out (small paintbrush and hoover) and
it works fine. Unfortunately the more vanes on your heatsink the more cooling but also the more chance of gathering dust.
One other option is your graphics driver. Nvidia and the Need for Speeds have always be buggy (so is the new Shift 
)
I've put the CPU onto the new MB without any new paste on the heatsink - is this necessary? Maybe I need to go get more paste?
(And yes, 6GB of Rram not Mb - doooh!!)
I'd try the paste ,,even though the surfaces look flat there not quite flat enough to mate perfect .
From Maplins presumeably?
Best stuff is the top quality heat transfer pads. They stick in place and "MELT" to fill tiny viods.
Darren
If it is a thermal paste problem, when you re-do it dont put too much on. have a look
here to see how to apply it correctly for a Quad core processor.
Make sure you clean all the old muck off properly first.
Also, are you running a 64 bit operating system? If not the maximum RAM that you can use is 4GB.
HTH
[Edited on 27/12/09 by cerbera]
Yes, 64bit, so I'm running a full 6Gb.
Cheers chaps....
The intel quad cores are not flat where the heatsink meets, they are concave. Most heatsink manufacturers are aware of this and produst their heatsinks to fit. If you are using the standard intel fan setup then you really need some paste on there too!
paste should sort it but check your idle/load temps first then see what the difference is after.
if still using the stock cooler its worth getting something better then overclocking the CPU a bit. new coolers shouldn't need paste as most come
with a pad ready to fit.
Check your heatsink, as bigfoot says, many have a sticky tape under them that acts as thermal paste. The thermal paste is just a thin skim over in
order to take into account the surface roughness and provide uniform heat transfer.
Stuttering in games can be due to many things, even something as daft as the CD being dirty or the drive failing causing IO stalls (my old read writer
suffers from this).
Run some CPU monitoring software (I think intel have some free downloads), preferably that you can set an audible alarm on a temperature threshold.
You should be able to tell if its the CPU overheating thats causing a speed step down.
If it didn't have a thermal pad and you didn't use paste then its pretty much certain you'll overheat it on game playing. At least
these days its a bit harder to fry a CPU doing this
quote:
Originally posted by Jasper
I have left the sides off (waiting for the new GC to come) - do you think this would have affected airflow enough to cause it to overheat? I've put them back on now.
Are you running the same resolution/level of anti-aliasing as before?
For gaming at high res, Vram is pretty critical and if it's pausing it could be loading textures into the memory on the graphics card.
Just another idea, as I've had artifacting with overclocked memory (on the graphics card) but overheating often locks the system up completely.
quote:
Originally posted by rustyk
Are you running the same resolution/level of anti-aliasing as before?
For gaming at high res, Vram is pretty critical and if it's pausing it could be loading textures into the memory on the graphics card.
Just another idea, as I've had artifacting with overclocked memory (on the graphics card) but overheating often locks the system up completely.
Did all the drivers, new Windows 7 install, and run the game from the PC, not the CD/DVD, so no problems there.... got some paste today, I'll give that a go tonight.
Re-pasted the fan tonite, downloaded some cpu temp monitoring software, game stalled again, and the temp didn't go above 61 deg.
So is that temp ok, and if so, what else could be causing this?
need to know what CPU you have to know what temps should be but i wouldn't of thought 61 would be a problem. mine is quite happy at mid to high
70's under load.
download coretemp or realtemp and then
prime95
monitor the temps while running prime95. options/torture test/small FFTs
that will max out all 4 cores and tell you what your full load temps are.
just checked mine, temps went up to about 98(throttles back at 100)
think i better try reseating my heatsink now
[Edited on 30/12/09 by bigfoot4616]
Cool, I'll give that a go. Just ordered a £20 new HSF from Scan recommended by one of their techies so I can have a little overclock
if the temps are okay you still want to look into the original problem before trying to overclock
I've got a new graphics card coming next week, I'll see if that sorts it first, if not, I've got a local techie guy I'll call in,
and he can sort it all out
quote:
Originally posted by bigfoot4616
just checked mine, temps went up to about 98(throttles back at 100)
think i better try reseating my heatsink now
Don't think so, it's a 3 year old Nvidia card with all updated drivers, was working fine for 3 weeks, then just started stuttering, I hadn't changed anything in the meantime.
Just checked the CPU temps with that software, didn't go over 71 deg, so looks ok.