Help Low fps

[mooSe_]

In the last week or so I've noticed that after a while of playing starcraft II, my frames per second drops really low so that the game is basically unplayable. I've been playing this game since beta with no problems, and until a few months ago I was playing it with all the graphics set to high. I have everything set to low now (I originally lowered the graphics because I preferred the way the game looked; not because of performance) but now the game runs worse than it used to on high. It's usually when there is lots of stuff going on; loads of units on the screen and battles and stuff. The game regularly displays the message "You are slowing down the game. Try lowering your graphics settings."

I opened up my computer a few days ago and noticed that one of the case fans had stopped working so I thought that might be the problem. I have replaced the fan but the problem persists.

I checked temperatures with speedfan but I don't really know what I'm looking at. my CPU temperatures went up to like 90 degrees when I played SC2. Is that bad? Anyone have any ideas as to what the problem might be or how I can diagnose it?

 

[Zenith.UK]

Bingo! You found your problem. 90c is higher than a CPU should be.
You need to remove your CPU heatsink/fan, remove as much of the gunk as you can from the base of the heatsink and the top of the CPU, apply a layer of thermal paste (Arctic Silver ftw! There are Youtube vids to show you how to do it properly), put it all back together and see if that makes any difference.

 

[mooSe_]

Ok thanks I'll give it a try.

 

[Sar]

Yep, CPU is definitely overheating, leading to poor performance. Blizz games are notoriously more heavily dependant on the CPU's performance than the GPU in your gfx card, so if the CPU is struggling, so will your game.

WoW's exactly the same, and I saw a bigger performance increase changing my CPU (Q6600 @ 3.1Ghz ->I5-2500k @ 3.3Ghz) than changing my gfx card (BFG OC 8800GT -> Asus GTX 560TI).

 

[mooSe_]

Arctic silver turned up this morning so I spent a while watching tutorial videos and read the instruction manual. I think I did it all right. It seems to be running a lot cooler straight away: all 4 cores are less than 50 degrees even though I've been playing games that would have caused it to crash yesterday. So unless something goes horribly wrong later it looks like the problem is solved \o/

Thanks.

 

[Lamp]

A happy customer. We should have him stuffed

 

[Zenith.UK]

Glad it worked out for you. Hold onto that tube of Arctic Silver. There were a number of times I went to a LAN party and saved someone's PC because I had my "PC toolkit" with me, which included a tube of AS.