Gaming problem with laptop

[soldave]

Right - I've almost got my Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo D 7800 laptop up and running for games. I've got the latest Omega drivers for the Radeon Mobility M6 graphics card inside, and have 768MB RAM. In some games I am experiencing a strange problem though. The game will run fine for a minute or so, and at a decent speed. The speed will then slow down until I'm only getting a few frames per second. After a minute of this it will speed back up again for another minute. This process then repeats. I'm having the same problem with other drivers, so it's not a driver issue.

I am wondering if the laptop could be overheating a little which is causing things to slow down. Has anyone experienced this problem before, and if so, how did you solve it? Also, in Doom 3 I have a problem where I only see the left side of character's faces - the right side is just black. Any ideas on that one?

 

[Rick]

If you are running on battery power, this is a possibility. While different laptops handle these things differently, power management can scale down the speed of your computer based on three factors - Power remaining, computer usage and heat.

It is possible that your computer is scaling down its speed to compensate for too much heat, or it would make sense if it is doing this on battery power too.

Does it do this on AC power as well?

 

[soldave]

I nearly always use my laptop plugged into the mains, especially when running games. The laptop could be compensating for heat - it's getting hot but not overly so.

I've also tried playing Battlefield 1942 which should run fine. It runs smoothly for about 30 seconds and then comes to a virtual standstill for a couple of minutes. If it hasn't crashed at this point it'll speed up again. Sounds just like throttling, but I don't know why it's doing it

 

[soldave]

The plot thickens even more. I've just run 3dMark2001 SE for around half an hour and it worked fine without slowdown. I thought it would slow down and crash after a couple of minutes but that was not the case. I will experiment with a couple more games and will report back. I've also got some Arctic Silver which I'll apply to the processor later on this evening.