Help, not used to.. new computer :D

zegh8578

zegh8578

Keeper of the trout
Orderite
Intel Core i5-2500K, 3.30GHz, 8GB Ram, a GeForce GTX 580 card

here's the thing - When I play GTA4, it hums nicely.
just now, when I tried to play Dreamfall, it screams like I'm setting it on fire. This has happened to a few other games I've tried.

I really expected a game like GTA4 to eat up way more resources than Dreamfall? Or am I way off here? I started out max graph w Dreamfall, then as the fan was roaring, I kept reducing it, now I'm to about half way - but it's ridiculous, I've been playing old games on bottom graphics for years, cus I had a stone-age computer. Now I have a computer than merely sighs to GTA4, but throws a fit when I try to run an older game?

Is this normal?

Is the fan just.. loud.. arbitrarily? The fan will get loud instantly, and stay loud. But with other games, like I said, GTA or New Vegas, it will only hum gently, and the case remains ice cold.

I hate when computer shiz gets all counter-intuitive like this -.- older game - struggle more! Newer game - struggle less!
 
That's kinda weird, I've no idea what could be causing that. Older games tend to rely more on CPU, but GTA4 is a massive CPU hog as far as I remember, too.
You could use Speedfan to fix your fan speeds while at the same time keeping an eye on temperatures and loads.
 
Thanks for quick reply!
After surfing a bit more for it, I did find that some had problems with this very game and with good GPUs - their solution was to turn on V-sync (it's in the games options). I did just that, and the fan has gone from worryingly loud, to quiet as a mouse, stark difference!
Obviously, I had no idea a lil check-box like V-sync could be this important :I

I am at a loss here, but then I don't know too much about this stuff.
How can V-sync on/off make such a tremendous difference? Is this a common occurence for some games?
 
zegh8578 said:
How can V-sync on/off make such a tremendous difference? Is this a common occurence for some games?
Click to expand...
That's because your graphics card is generating several hundreds (or thousands!) of frames per second with V-Sync turned off. Yes, it's common thing, I've noticed that in Legend of Grimrock for instance. There's also option to force V-Sync on through the NVidia control panel for games which doesn't support this function.
 
This problem is one of the most annoying things in PC gaming also known as coil whine, here's an explanation here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coil_noise

It's not harmful to your hardware but it is very annoying.

Also Grand theft Auto 4 is a poorly optimized console port which is why it runs slow on max settings even on super computers.
 
Last edited:
coldroll said:
This problem is one of the most annoying things in PC gaming also known as coil whine, here's an explanation here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coil_noise

It's not harmful to your hardware but it is very annoying.

Also Grand theft Auto 4 is a poorly optimized console port which is why it runs slow on max settings even on super computers.
Click to expand...

The wiki description doesn't really fit my case tho, since my hardware is new and almost un-used (some of it was in fact not used at all), and the noise happened only with a few games (solved by turning on v-sync)

However, what you describe sounds almost exactly what was going on with my first computer, which - as it aged - got louder and louder, untill - almost overnight, its volume doubled, and it basically sounded like a gasoline engine whenever I turned it on :I
 
This has nothing to do with coils, really. That powerful video card is overheating by tremendous amount of frames generated every second in older games, that's why its autoregulated fans are spinning faster. Simple as that.
 
This started happening to me. The fan would get loud and the computer would get kind of hot. I figured it wasn't a big deal since the computer was just working harder to play the game.

A few months later however, my games also started to experience lag and sound distortion when the fan would start running like that. It only runs like that for like 90 seconds max, and then stops. It does it slightly often, and random points. Mainly when a video in the game plays. I clean your fan before it causes hardware problems.

I'm on a laptop, Windows 8 core i7, intel Hewlett Packard.
 
This is why I am quick to stop and figure these things out. The game in question plays smoothly now, and the fan is nice and quiet, as it should. I am not very wealthy, and I usually cannot afford expensive shit, so replacing expensive hardware is usually out of the question for me.

On my first computer, I managed to melt my graphics card, and my only economical option then was to downgrade -.-
 
coldroll said:
Your right it has nothing to do with coils it's caused by the capacitors in motherboards,power supplies and Graphics cards. I don't know why they call it coil whine but that's what it is. Here's a better example.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HP73edpQwgc
Click to expand...

That is quite a unique sound, sounds like rubber surfaces rubbing together or something. What I had was a fan going insane, wind and all
(I might not have been clear about that to begin with, I was under the assumption that the fan is the primary source of computer noise, so I assumed noise would be understood as fan.)
 
You should try cleaning your computer out with some compressed air and also try a fan monitoring program like Evga precision x or MSI afterburner. You can manually set the GPU fan to around 60 or 70 and it won't throttle down like that.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top