Is my video card too hot?

LOG said:

So, I'm in a WoW ICC raid. My FPS has been a bit slow lately, but still manageable.
Nvidia GeForce 130M card, and only Good settings, and I'm only pulling ~30 FPS. I was somewhat concerned, but I figured as long as it was still performing it was okay.

We hit Lord Marrowgar. I plummet straight down to 5 FPS for the whole fight.
Horrible, checked my laptops temp, and it said the graphic card(GPU) was running at around 170F. Is that too hot?
I don't know what else could be the problem. I did this exact same instance last week and had no issues.

It's kind of been getting worse for awhile, I used to be able to use Ultra settings and still get ~50 FPS. But I've just had to keep downgrading my graphics lately, or else my FPS becomes horrible.

Any ideas on what might be the problem, if it's not my card temp?

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Don't know much about video cards, but 170 degrees Fahrenheit sounds pretty darn hot to me! I suggest you take action to solve this problem as soon as you can.

Could also be a ram issue. Try to close all other apps that might be running in the background while gaming, including anti-virus cos they can be taxing on hdd and ram.

Good idea in general to keep your laptop cool in the summer months. If you don't have AC, get a small desk fan to blow on it, aiming at the bottom of the machine if possible. I blew out the motherboard of a gaming laptop once on an eighty degree day with no AC.

Third theory is if you're running the latest FPS your machine may be getting too old to handle them proper and thus the constant need to downgrade graphics performance. A sad reality all PC gamers must one day confront is that our once ultra modern rig is no longer the shit.

I know it sounds hot, 170 isn't that hot for some cards. My last one ran at around that, and I had no issue with it.

It could be a fluctuation in your bandwidth. Do you always play on Saturdays?

In my experience, when I overheat, the machine reboots. I have a desktop machine that does this quite often every summer, and one day when I'm not so lazy I'll add another fan. On my other desktop, the video card popped a couple months ago -- all the tops split open on the capacitors. No slowdowns like yours, though I don't play the games that you do.

Your card temps are definitely okay...170f= ~76 degrees Celsius, and your card should be able to handle temps in the mid 90's c.

What are your cpu temps? If your cpu gets too hot, it'll slowdown till it cools a bit, which may be the reason your frame rates are falling.

Your bandwidth/pings could be a factor, as your game needs to get it's data from the wow servers.

Try playing some other games, and see if the performance slowdown affects them as well.

But, it's most likely an issue with blizzard. I did a search, and other people have been experiencing the same problem you have.

http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=12304393524&sid=1

Your computer needs a blow job.


Really.

Attack all the vents with a vacuum cleaner and/or a compressed air hose. Higher ambient temperature may contribute to your problems, but the "getting worse for a while" sounds like dust buildup. As it builds up the CPU and/or GPU won't get as much airflow and will heat up more doing the same operations as before.

A machine slowing down is always as software issue. If hardware breaks, it breaks. You might get random freezes, shutdowns, or it may not work at all, but it doesn't slow down.

Lhun said:

A machine slowing down is always as software issue. If hardware breaks, it breaks. You might get random freezes, shutdowns, or it may not work at all, but it doesn't slow down.

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So temperature-activated CPU throttling is a complete fiction? I'm reading about it on the Internet, so it HAS to be true...

That's also done by software, to prevent the machine from freezing up. If you don't throttle, it doesn't get slower (though it might overheat).
While it might sound a clever idea, it's a pretty damn stupid one actually. It means either the CPU cooler is underpowered, or you paid for a faster CPU than you actually need.

76.6 C is too bloody hot. Seriously. The hardware might be able to take up to 90 C, but you need to keep things below that by a wide margin if you want your system to last. Depending on your system config you might already be throttling at those temps, but you probably have some software issues as well. Gut, clean, defrag and update. Everything.

To give you an example of proper cooling, my system stays below 35 C when I'm gaming (Mass Effect 2 on max, Fo3 modded, TES:IV modded, Crysis High & modded, etc) and when I'm rendering (24 hour+ high level fractals using 3rd party plugins). It isn't a laptop, of course, but it should serve as a good example of how systems are supposed to run.

Also, open up the case and dust. Every month. Every. Single. Month.

Nah. 70+ is a little hot, but 60 is about normal. It's not like chips can slowly melt. You can expect a perfectly normal lifespan out of a machine if it runs at those temperatures, and dusting every month is excessive too. If you do it that often, you're more likely to accidentally damage something when dusting than to lose anything to overheating.

The only component in a PC that has a lifespan really influenced by running temperature is the power supply. And you can expect to replace that every few years anyway.

The problem with a laptop though, is that heat radiated from one component affects the others to a greater degree than in a desktop. Effectively, one thing overheating results in everything overheating, and that can get messy.

I suppose with a laptop monthly cleaning might be a bit overkill. I've gotten used to that routine due to how open of a case I'm using; it might as well be open-frame.

System temperature should be lower than chip temperature, but then, it always is. Your system probably shouldn't exceed 50° or so, but even at temperatures that high there's not much effect. Google did a huge test on HDD failure rate (being the most vulnerable part of a machine, since they're not solid-state) and even an average temperate of 50° would only raise the failure rate by a few (single digit) percent. While good cooling is important, especially if you overclock, it's not like overheating is likely to cause any actual damage to the hardware. Of course, if the machine constantly locks up because of overheating it doesn't help much to know that the hardware isn't harmed, it's still not in working order.
But chip temperatures of around 60°C (140F) are fine, and as long as they don't rise, the coolers don't need cleaning yet.

If the machine has temperature throttling enabled, i recommend disabling it and monitoring the chip temperature. If that gets too high, clean the cooler or get a better one, more difficult for a laptop though.
I wouldn't recommend a laptop as gaming rig anyway though, you pay a higher price, and get a worse performance compared to a desktop. (It's kinda like buying a Mac )