The Glade 4.0

Backstory first

I appear to be having the same problem described in this thread on the Steam forums:


My hardware specs are a little bit different, as I've got an AMD FX-6100, but my CPU temp jumps from an everyday average of 50-60° C to an observed high of 82° C after a couple hours' worth of gameplay - and BL2 is the only game that heats up my processor this way.

And now, the question on which I'd like input

Will upgrading from my current video card (a 1GB GeForce GT 640) to something both more powerful and more specifically designed for gaming do anything to ameliorate this problem?
My theory is that the CPU is doing a lot of work that the GPU isn't capable of handling and that an oomphier card would reduce the workload currently being placed on the CPU, thereby somewhat reducing the overheating problem.

Does this theory hold any water at all, or is the problem 100% confined to the CPU itself - either presented as "your cooling system needs maintenance and I have no idea why the problem is only apparent when you play this one game" or "there's definitely something going on with the game code that's pushing your CPU like that and until the devs acknowledge and fix it, you're going to have a bad time no matter what you do"?

_________________
Go back to zero, take a pill, and get well ~ Lemmy Kilmister

Very few (if any?) modern game engines will shift work back and forth between the CPU and the GPU, with the exception of PhysX processing on NVidia cards. It's just not how the rendering engine is built.

As such, the only thing you could do to prevent your CPU from executing the workload it's being given would be to downgrade your GPU to cause the game engine to be GPU-limited, theoretically taking the strain off the CPU by throttling the workload being demanded of it to the now-pushed-to-the-limit GPU. You might be able to achieve a similar effect by turning the resolution up, as this typically loads the GPU pretty independently of the CPU.

More likely, there's something wrong with your CPU or CPU cooling, and it's only showing up in Borderlands 2 because it happens to be more CPU-intensive than other games you play.

Crack open the case, dust off your heatsink, and if it's still being a problem, you can try removing the heatsink, cleaning both contact surfaces with a solvent like nail polish remover and then with some rubbing alcohol, and then re-applying fresh thermal paste and reinstalling the heatsink.

If that's still a no-go, then it might be something introduced in a patch that's interacting with your CPU poorly, sure.

_________________
"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Try seeing if any of the graphical effects are rendered by CPU - things like shadows usually are. If you can turn those off it may make a difference.

I'm inclined to believe that you either have a cooling problem, or a stinky piece of software. If you have a brand name unit you might have some diagnostics available that have cpu stress testing.

_________________
I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Well, I *am* using an NVidia card, and Physx *is* a feature of this particular game, so it would seem this is a possibility here.How would I be able to determine this?My PC has shut down in the middle of a play session on 2 occasions, and the temp reporting is coming from both Speccy and SpeedFan, so there's no doubt in my mind about the data being bad.
As for there being a cooling problem (which I'm not entirely ruling out), the computer is less than a year old, was built by a shop I trust, and only heats up with this one game and no other. Add to that the fact that I'm not the only one having this "only BL2 heats up my processor" experience and I think my suspicion that this isn't simply a matter of improper cooling. Insufficient cooling for the specific circumstances, yes - but if that's because the circumstances are unusual, I'd prefer attacking the root of the problem rather than the symptom.

_________________
Go back to zero, take a pill, and get well ~ Lemmy Kilmister

What you need is another tool/program to run CPU utilization up to 100 percent so that you can read the temp then. Since I work on dells and they have that built in, I have no idea what that would be.

_________________
I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Prime95 is a great tool for hammering the hell out of your cpu cores. I originally ran that when I overclocked my rig (over five years ago, still runs great). You want to run that in conjunction with what temps your cores are at. The general consensus is if you can run it for 24 hours with no errors in the program and your cores never going above a temp that you deem safe, you're golden. I've never seen a game come even close to what prime95 (specifically it's torture test feature) does to your cpu.

_________________
Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

Have you tried running through the GeForce tweak guide for BL2?

http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/guides ... ak-guide#1

Haven't seen that webpage before, but I did optimize via NVIDIA GeForce Experience.

_________________
Go back to zero, take a pill, and get well ~ Lemmy Kilmister

Update on this : apparently BL2 just hits my CPU like no other game I own. Dusted out the heat sink and re-pasted the CPU; temps are much more manageable now. Was going to upgrade the video card anyway, since it still is sub-par, but my car started overheating as well, so that's where I'm spending my money for now.

_________________
Go back to zero, take a pill, and get well ~ Lemmy Kilmister