Thinkpads Forum

I used to play GTA IV on my W510 about a year ago and I remember tweaking all the settings to get best performance and acceptable framerates, thought I would share something I found.

1 of the last things I did after changing all the in-game performance settings was to adjust the windows 7 power options under Power Manager. Now I assumed I should run at highest CPU with maximum fan cooling but there was a better way I found out after tweaking a little - It was to run at lowest or low CPU instead of adaptive or highest.

My theory is that when running at highest on Power Manager, the CPU heats up and then passes the heat onto the discrete FX880M causing it to constantly throttle. So when I changed it to the lowest CPU setting, GTA was at a constant framerate and not stuttering and the game was playable – put about 150 hours into it. When it was on highest CPU setting it would run okay for 30 seconds and then stutter forever after.

Didn’t know if you lot have tried this but I remember this surprising me back then, never would of thought lowest would run better than highest in games. So if you're still gaming and haven't tried already give it a go.

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing. I might need to fire it up to give it a go,as I remember Battlefield was doing the stuttering you were describing.

I guess the goal here is to lower the CPU enough to meet the requirements of the game. If the CPU is lowered and then doesn’t meet the game requirements, then I doubt there is point in this.

Also guessing this will work on any system where the discrete graphics is after the CPU sharing the same heat sink. Just make sure when the CPU is lowered, it still must meet the game requirements.

And don’t expect more frame rate, instead what happened for me was the frame rate was constant, it was constantly around 28-31 frames except when I was on the beach driving with sand kicking up and rainy weather - that brought it down because of the additional detail.

These processors do turbo boost. The turbo boost could have been heating the CPU enough that it has to throttle down every 5 seconds and dropping frames because of that, so the speed was never constant.

I figure what you did with the power setting forced the CPU to both a lower speed and a constant speed with none of that thermal throttling.

My W500 CPU got heated pretty soon, Inguess the heatsink cooper tube is old.
These machines are too old now...

iaeaix wrote:My W500 CPU got heated pretty soon, Inguess the heatsink cooper tube is old.
These machines are too old now...

Copper doesn't get old like meat of bread

You might have dried-out thermal pads though

On gaming; buy a desktop