Overheat problem

zehcoutinho

Distinguished
Dec 9, 2011
25
2
18,535
Hi,

My notebook turned itself off because of excessive temperature, and afterwards I detected a problem while trying to play Skyrim. I used to play normally, but now the load time of my save is much much bigger and when it does load, the framerate is absurdly lower than I was used to while playing before. It's worth mentioning that the automatic hardware detection of the game would set the graphics to High, and now it sets it to Medium.

I think the problem is the videocard, but I am not sure as I'm not a very advanced user. But I did some research and saw that if the problem was the processor (i7 Q720), I would most likely be seeing problems in normal Windows usage, but there has been none. I also did the diagnostic by pressing F12 on startup, and it didn't find anything wrong.

Then it asked me if I wanted to do a more extensive memory test, I said yes and it tested my memory for about half an hour and found nothing. Then to test the video card (Nvidia GeForce GTX 260M) I downloaded 3DMark Vantage, and both times I ran it, I got very low framerates and after the test it said that the test did not show the real performance of the card, and told me to test again with a lower preset.

I cannot change the preset, maybe because I'm running the free version, but the preset is set to Performance, wich I believe is already the lowest. For the reasons above I think the problem is with my video card. Is it possible that it was damaged by overheating? The thing is, most reports of video card problems I see involve some kind of graphical error like lines or strange shapes, whereas I'm only seeing framerate issues, but the graphics seem normal.

Is there any other tests I could run to narrow down the cause of the problem? Any feedback will be appreciated. Thank you very much.
 

zehcoutinho

Distinguished
Dec 9, 2011
25
2
18,535
I have cleared the grid through wich the fan sucks air. But I don't think it's temp related because I usually have a temp monitor running when at home, because that's where I game, and I have a external fan blowing all the time. But this happened while I was at work, where I only use the computer for spreadsheets and such, that are not very demanding, so usually I don't keep the monitor running. This one day I downloaded a mod and tested it out, and without the extra fan and the temp monitor it overheated without me realizing.