Thursday

Monitoring your system temperatures

Filed under PC

(If you play ArmA2 you might want to read this)

Not long ago I overclocked my Q6600 2.4ghz processor to 3.3ghz and the difference in gaming is astounding. Definitely worth the effort and expense (namely one $40 CPU cooler) and I learned a lot in the process as well, not the least of which is knowing and understanding your system temperatures.

With apps like HWMonitor, CoreTemp, SpeedFan and Everest there is no reason not to keep an eye on your temps even if you’re running at stock speeds. Seeing how different games affect your temperatures can really help you nail down where issues might be, and also help you fix seemingly random crashes. Take ArmA2 for instance, which I’ve been writing about a lot lately. In the past couple of days I’ve been seeing more and more crashes, and experience has shown that the sort of crash I’ve been seeing is related to overheated graphics cards (I have an SLI setup). Coincidentally it has been rather hot and muggy in my area of the world lately.  I decided to do some testing and see where my temps were, and whatwas driving them up causing crashes/freezes.

Long story short in ArmA2, more than anything else pushing my view distance out really far raised my temps faster than anything. I would start up the helicopter training mission, then take off and fly out to the aircraft carrier and back. With my view distance at near max my cards would be pushing 92c by the time I reached the carrier, and 94c by the time I reached shore. I’d almost always freeze up due to heat shortly after that. Pulling my view distance back to 5000 or so allowed me to fly the same route and only hit 88c by the time I returned and landed. Still a bit hot for my liking. Continue…