Spring RTS Engine

Springs engine performance was declining for me for the last months more and more, so much, that lately I couldn't even play small games without *massive* lag.

Completely unrelated I changed my DE and checked out the available panel widgets - and through pure coincidence found out, that my CPU (i5 2,57GHz in a notebook) was throttling down and up and down and up cause of to much heat - doh! Easy to imagine that a hopping between 2,6 and 1,2 GHz isn't the best for a smooth spring experience :D

So after a thorough vacuum sucking and lifting the notebook a little above the table for better thermal radiation and air sucking - I have steady fps again - a real "Spring engine performance boost" ;-D

dansan wrote:Springs engine performance was declining for me for the last months more and more, so much, that lately I couldn't even play small games without *massive* lag.

Completely unrelated I changed my DE and checked out the available panel widgets - and through pure coincidence found out, that my CPU (i5 2,57GHz in a notebook) was throttling down and up and down and up cause of to much heat - doh! Easy to imagine that a hopping between 2,6 and 1,2 GHz isn't the best for a smooth spring experience :D

So after a thorough vacuum sucking and lifting the notebook a little above the table for better thermal radiation and air sucking - I have steady fps again - a real "Spring engine performance boost" ;-D

Also it helps to replace your "thermal paste", if you have your notebook for more than 2 years, i cracked mine open a few months ago, dam "HP" fuses stuff together like a maniac.

Good to know!
Did the paste evaporate or somehow loose/lower its transmitting function, or was it simply bad from the beginning? ...is this something everyone should do with their CPUs every x years?

In many cases vacuuming the fan from the outside is not sufficient to get rid of the dust and you have to open up the machine. I have dismantled many notebooks for this specific cleaning procedure. Sometimes easy due to the design, other times very hard.

Older notebooks that cannot throttle the speed don't just get slow, they overheat and crash or trigger an emergency shutdown.

The thermal paste eventually dries and falls off like dust. Sometimes there is a small gap between the chip and the heatsink, and this will of course make it much more prone to fail.

zerver wrote:The thermal paste eventually dries and falls off like dust. Sometimes there is a small gap between the chip and the heatsink, and this will of course make it much more prone to fail.

Uh yeah... that makes sense... I hope it won't happen to soon... while PCs are kind of tinker-friendly, I'm a little timid with notebooks, as everything is so damn cramped in there, and a lot cannot be replaced as it's all onboard.

I did the same recently as well- took the dust out of my heatsink and not only got a big performace boost but i could have it on my lap again without being slowroasted.

Unfortunately the noobs at Dell who designed my laptop required me to remove the keyboard, RAM, net card, speakers, screen cable, battery and touchpad and in order to reach the fans/heatsink.

Won't you see when that kind of action is needed by monitoring cpu temperature with something like Speedfan?

Needed is somehwat subjective when you read what i had to do my laptop. But yes speedfan will show all that stuff.

Common sense possibly wins over speedfan here, bad signs are:

• Almost no airflow is coming out of the fan exhaust, especially at the lowest fan speeds
• The fan is very noisy and spins fast despite a low/medium system load
• The fan sounds muffled or like it is under strain

Generally laptops are a prime example of planned obsolescence so I don't buy them anymore. Rubbish for gaming.

okay for coding, so okay with me

The older of my two is going on five years and is showing no signs of age, but it was very high end when I bought it.

Well, I have a desktop, but the cpu-fan is so huge that I think I need to dismantle the motherboard if I want to take it out.

Jools wrote:... is so huge ...

maybe you remove the motherboard from the heatsink?