Msi 7600 GT sloooo down!

Offalycool

My bro thinks his graphics card has degraded performance.. slowdowns to 5 frames a sec in medieval total war, and swat 4. He hasn't changed any settings and he only plays in modest resolutions with no AA. He tried uninstalling and reinstalling his drivers.. but this hasn't helped.
Any suggestions?

christophicus

Is there any corruption on the screen?? THe card may be overheating?

8T8

Power supply problem perhaps it's not getting enough juice from the PCI-e slot ?

Only real way to test that out it to plug another PSU into the board and see if anything changes.

That and he didn't by any chance force AA on in the control panel and forgot about it ?

Offalycool

Thanks for the feedback.

There's no corruption on the screen. And it's passively cooled.
It’s a new pc. The PSU is a 600w Xsilence from ankermann-pc. I would have though this would be enough but maybe its just crap. Unfortunately I don’t have another to replace it with. The temperature of the card under load is about 49 degrees according to the Nvidia control panel. I haven’t had a chance to look at the machine myself yet. But I was planning to remove the drivers completely using driver cleaner, and then reinstall.
Next to that I guess ill just make sure everything’s plugged in. The cpu is an E6600, with a gigabyte 965 s3 motherboard and 2 gig of ram.

Edit: He says the settings are set to application specific, and he only use AF

Offalycool

Hi all

I haven't had a chance to look at his machine yet.. but I have been corresponding via instant message. We had lengthy conversations about the problem, and it occurred to us there my be a problem with his cpu overheating, (E6600, not overclocked) causing it to throttle.. maybe explaining the degraded graphic performance in games. So he ran TAT for a while and it reports a temperature of 76 degrees under load. Under games it runs at about 65 degrees.

I am thinking this may be due to the heatsink being ineffectively seated, or maybe the thermal compound.. but at any rate.. when he sent me a picture of his voltages in speed fan.. I noticed his 2nd core has a much higher voltage.. of 1.8 . I also notced the voltage meter says he has 16.97 v on his 12 volt rail. Is this normal.. I suspect not. Could this high 12 volt rail be responsible for the excessively high heat in the cpu?

christophicus

i dont know much about voltages and whatnot but I would deffinatly swap that psu if its possiblt to see if that helps .Try and us the pc as little as possible the CPU is running very hot indeed. Core 2 duos are supposed to run very cool.

8T8

That's definitely not normal 76c under load, CPU throttling defintely could be the cause, a normal average temp under load for a E6600 should be anywhere from 54-64c under load depending on the cooler.

Remove the CPU heatsink and clear of any thermal compound on the CPU and cooler and re-apply an even layer of thermal paste (use a credit card to even it out).

duridian

You should try another program to verify those high voltage readings as well. 16.97 on the 12volt seems way, way overvolted. It's usually the other way you have to worry, that the voltage would be going too low.
I'd suggest trying Pc Wizard and CPU-Z from www.cpuid.com, and see if you get similar readings. If you do get the same result then there is a good chance of the PSU being dodgy. In fact you should probably verify the PSU voltages with a multimeter as well if you have one. Easiest way would maybe be to get a reading of the voltage from a molex connector while the pc is running.
High voltage like that could kill your pc's components after a short term.