SoA frying my CPU (tech problem)

[Faceman]

I'm having a very severe and disturbing technical problem. Every time I start SoA my CPU temperature jumps up infinitely and consequently leads my PC to emergency shutdown.

Details:
* I have a Full installation of SoA with official patch, Baldurdash, GrandMastery patch and Bonus merchants (no ToB, original and NOT backup CDs, no mods)
* This problem occurs even if I only start up and look at the Main Menu for 5 minutes.
* This problem occured before and I attributed it to the hot weather and an instable Windows installation - I have now done a reinstall of Windows and the weather has cooled of -> the problem still persists
* I do NOT have this problem with other applications or games (Adobe Premiere, IWD2, GTA3, Half-Life,...)

Any idea what is causing this. Apart from making me unable to play my favourite game longer than about 10 minutes I find it also very disturbing technically.

[Dace De'Briago]

I get similar problems pretty often, though my problem usually manifests as in-game slowdown.

I'd personally put it down to one of 2 things:

1) Inadequate heating on the processor/in your PC case. Just upgrade the fan or add a few in-case coolers.
2) The menu screen does access the CDROM, which in turn puts some strain on your CD IDE channel at the same time your hard drive IDE channels are running. This can contribute to overheating.

Personally, I'd probably:

a) Turn down some of the graphics settings for SoA (animations, node count, detail levels).
b) Possibly change the graphics options, including screen resolutions, colour depth and graphics renderer (try and use hardware rendering as opposed to software rendering if possible).
c) Buy a new CPU fan.

Hope that helps.

[andrewas]

This is weird. If it dosent happen with IWD2 but does with BG2, I'm not entirely sure what that means.

My feeling is that its not possible for well-behaved software to hit the CPU hard enough to heat it that much, and if it was IWD2 would be worse than BG2 as its a more powerful version of the same basic program. What software is monitoring your CPU temps? Possibly its getting confused somehow, that seems more likely than the CPU actualy going into radical overheat for no reason.

Most of them have a history function, set that going and run the game, if the resulting graph raises slowly it may be real, if its a instant increase its a software artifact and you should be able to safely turn off the monitor. A overheat of this magnituide will make itself felt of its own accord anyway, and you wont take more than a week off your CPU life anyway. Which is a lot less severe than it sounds.

If its real, then the only thing I can think of would be a malfunctioning driver of some description. Upgrade the lot, and remember to include your motherboard drivers, which far to many people forget about.

[Faceman]

It's double weird as I don't think that
1.) cooling is the problem as it works fine for every other application
2.) I can't imagine that BG2 is putting to much pressure on a Gforce5, AMD XP2000+ system. It's not state of the art I agree but far above the requirements of SoA.

To answer some things:

Heat is NOT increasing instantly tough it is fast (5C/10F in 2 minutes)
New drivers are installed only thing I still could do is a BIOS update.

Maybe I look into the IDE suggestions. My 7200HDs are famous for heat production (although their extra fan keeps them cool). Yet I cannot see why this would cause the CPU to overheat (note that the system temperature does not increase)

[andrewas]

have you tried turning off the monitor and seeing what happens? A single overheat shutdown wont do any damage, and if that dosent happen its probably just an instrumentation problem. Which mobo are you using, might be worth checking the manufacturers site for any known weirdness.

[Faceman]

I'm running on an Epox 8K9A (Via KT400)
I have not found anything on their page - maybe I'll have another look.

Just tried it with the minimum requirements settings. Still heating up.
I really think it's a software problem. Some prog just starting an infinite loop and thus using up all the CPU resources.

The only thing I changed before the problem occured was the Grandmastery Patch - maybe I take it off.

The sad thing is that this problem was the start of a (not causally connected)series of bad luck which burned down my Gforce 4200Ti and made me buy a new Vga adapter and do a Windows reinstall. Yet after all that trouble I went through it still persists.

BTW why should I turn off the monitor?

[ 06-25-2003, 05:52 PM: Message edited by: Faceman ]

[Dace De'Briago]

Like I said mate, I have exactly the same problem with SoA... it just consumes so many resources and the game starts to crawl.

At the very worst times, the computer actually crashes. Sometimes I have 20 second hard drive accesses to save the game. Not good eh

The strange thing is, the real slowdowns can be somewhat sporadic... some days there isnt a problem, other days... it really crawls.

It could *possibly* be due to a slightly dodgy fan on the graphics card.

New suggestion: Pop open your case, and keep an eye on the graphics card fan for a day or 2.

[Faceman]

my graphics card has passive cooling
and it's the CPU overheating but not from playing SoA from leaving the menu there with only the music playing in the background alone it does
I never had this problem before on this system nor on my old system (Athlon 800)

[slicer15]

That is really odd...sure, BG2 heats up my machine, but it never shut it down cos of that, it doesn't even slow down during gameplay...I take removing that patch didn't work? The Grandmaster one? Very odd...

[Faceman]

okay - here is what happened
I tried EVERYthing (including an now deleted installation of CPUidle) -> no effect.
And now the effect is just gone!?!
Ever had a persistent problem disappear for no apparent reason?
I'm scared now and pray it does not return.
Just to be on the safe side I leave my case open for a few days.