Video card and gaming confusion

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Lightingbird

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I’m more of a troubleshooting guy but I have trying to understand graphics, video cards, rendering, and stuff like that a bit better. So basically I’m a little confused on what’s going on and I’d like to know what is wrong in the future. Here is the setup:

I’m running on a Acer AMD turion with 64x2, 4gbs of ram, geforce 8400M G(fully overclocked – ha I think), running on Vista 32, this laptop sits on a NZXT ACC-NT-CRYO-S 120MM Aluminum Notebook Cooler, running NHC and speedfan in the background. Ok now that information is out of the way. Here come the questions.

1. Let’s talk examples. Currently I have the games Command and Conquer all stars and Empire Total war. Both great games. I did an experiment recently. I ran both of them on lowest settings and played for about 20 minutes. Now the game will play overall will slow and putter at times. Almost like some sort of graphics lag. At the lowest settings! Wait! Then I’ll go back and crank up the settings to the max in every category. I mean the highest in everything. I’ll run them both for about 20 minutes. Same thing, game runs great and looks great but every say five minutes or so it will slow and sputter and then suddenly speed up again. What causes this and is there anyway to stop it? Is it possible there is something not on or enabled in the nvidia 3d settings causing this?

2. I use speedfan and NHC for heat monitoring. Speedfan seems to watch my gpu pretty good and my nhc is good at looking at the CPU. Is there a proven better of the two not just preferences? What is considered too hot for a video card and CPU?

Ugh I’m sure I have more questions but this is all I can think of right now.
 
The slowdowns are caused by the Cool & Quiet technology on the AMD CPUs, which lowers the CPU frequency and fan speed to conserve power and reduce the likelihood of the laptop heating up. Intel has a similar technology called SpeedStep. Do you have the laptop plugged in while gaming?

I doubt it will happen with the laptop plugged in. If it still does, manually set the power profile to Maximum Performance mode to ensure it does not happen.

And the best way to monitor temps is to use multiple programs. SpeedFan is notorious for readings that are way off the actual ones.
 
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