Extreme Framerate Drop

[Auger]

Everything with the new patch was fine until this evening.  The framerate was averaging in the 40s, which works fine for me.  Tonight I logged on and grabbed a Panzer for base defense and the framerate was around 5.  

I had messed around with the skin viewer last night, so I logged out, deleted it and all the skins, and tried again.  Still got 5 FPS.

Logged out, backed up all of my add-ons, uninstalled AH2, downloaded AH2081.EXE, reinstalled.  The frame rate was where it was prior, but only for about 3 minutes.  Then it went right back to under 10.  This happens offline, online and in 8 player LAN mode.

I have hunted for spyware, virii, etc. and found nothing.  

Help me Skuzzy-wan.  You're my only hope.


P.S.  I tried to insert DxDiag results, but they're about 39,000 characters too long for the post.  I'll email them if you want them

[Skuzzy]

Please email the DXDIAG report.  Also, it would be helpful to know what in-game video settings you are using.

[Auger]

Never mind.  Thank you anyway.

I did some more troubleshooting.  It turns out that the computer was hitting a thermal limit.  The PWM temperature reading was exceeding some internal arbitrary setting, causing the CPU to throttle back.  The BIOS only has a CPU temperature setting, which probably is used for PWM.  Running the Abit Hardware Doctor v 2.72 and jacking the PWM alert to 90 centigrade overrides the internal limiter.  

According to Abit, PWM stands for Pulse Wave Modulation, which consists of the chips on the motherboard that convert voltages.  They tend to to run hotter than the CPU during heavy loads, which AH2 certainly provides.  One should not worry about these temps until they exceed 100 centigrade regularly.

I'm still baffled as to why this problem showed up on Sunday.  The household temperature wasn't any higher than previous days.  The system has never had a heat problem before.  I even blew all the dust bunnies away today with no change in PWM temperature.  Time to add a fan or two.