Guild Wars 2

So, my computer was knocked over last night while I was playing. And I can’t figure out what is wrong. Nothing crashed, and the game and my music kept chugging along. However, my framerate was cut in half and gets down to 11 FPS when i’m turning my camera around in the mists.

I’ve looked at all the hardware and nothing looks to be broken, I’ve checked to see if everything is registering in system properties, and I’ve made sure the graphics card is still secured. Is there anything I can do to find the problem?

Disclaimer: I’m not super knowledgeable on computers, but I did build this over a year ago.

I know you said you checked your graphics card but I’d double check to make sure it’s seated in the slot properly. Try removing it and reinserting it and once you think it’s seated properly, give it a firm push just to be sure.

I’ve had graphics cards come unseated before and it has produced some strange behavior.

EDIT: Also make sure the power connector is still connected to the video card properly, and that the heatsink is still making proper contact with the graphics processor, and the fan is operating correctly. Most graphics cards will throttle down speed when they’re not getting enough power or they are overheating.

So I double-checked that the graphics card was secure and the wires attached to it are also secured. And I’m still having the same problem.

When I rebooted it dawned on me that I didn’t check the CPU, could this be a CPU problem? Or would the system just refuse to start if there was something wrong with it. It does seem to take longer to boot up.

Also, thanks for the reply.

Fomby.4295:

So I double-checked that the graphics card was secure and the wires attached to it are also secured. And I’m still having the same problem.

When I rebooted it dawned on me that I didn’t check the CPU, could this be a CPU problem? Or would the system just refuse to start if there was something wrong with it. It does seem to take longer to boot up.

Also, thanks for the reply.

I suppose anything is possible, really. Hardware can do some wonky stuff when its damaged, but really sounds like your graphics card is being throttled down which it would do if it was overheating or deprived power… especially since your computer didn’t crash when it was knocked over.

Do you have monitoring software you can install to check the status of your video card? EVGA has Precision X which should work for all nVidia cards. You can also install CPU-Z and confirm the PCI-E bus is running at the correct speed.

If you are happy you’ve ruled out any issue with your video card I’d begin examining other components for signs of damage. Also, if you have another computer you could begin swapping out hardware to try to isolate the issue. If you have another hard drive lying around you could try doing a fresh install of your operating system to see if that fixes the issue.

One last thing to consider is that you may have damaged your hard drive. Magnetic hard drives are very sensitive to shock and desktop models typically don’t have any anti-shock safeguards. This would help explain the slow startup time. I suppose it could cause issues in game if the game was really slow to load the data it needed. In any case it might be wise to make backups of your important data if you don’t already have one.

make sure all the wires on your motherboard are still secured – some boards have an additional 4 or 8pin for power ( some have 2 ) – while the board may still function without it – it won’t have the same power.

also keep an eye on your system temperatures to make sure something didn’t happen to the cooling system and as a result, running hotter – less efficient.

Hello again! Thanks for the replies. I downloaded CPU-Z and hope ya’ll can help with the information collected.

What I did find odd, was that my processor (i5 2500 3.30GHz) fluctuates a lot when I ran GW2. (Or at least I thought it was a lot.)

Upon opening gw2 it ran at ~3300 MHz, I let it sit in the character screen and it dropped to ~2200MHz. After entering the game I was in the Mists where it ran fairly smoothly but dropped down the ~1800MHz. Then I went into WvW. Visual lag was terrible apparent when activating pretty skills (symbols for guardians.) and the speed would drop to ~800MHz. I was also running around loading the environment if that matters.

Bus Speed is 99.7X MHz. Which I think is good?

Also, Ricky brought up the power issue, so I don’t know if it’s helpful, but the Core Voltage is at .912 V.

Would EVGA work with Radeon cards? I have a Radeon HD 6850.

Fomby.4295:

Hello again! Thanks for the replies. I downloaded CPU-Z and hope ya’ll can help with the information collected.

What I did find odd, was that my processor (i5 2500 3.30GHz) fluctuates a lot when I ran GW2. (Or at least I thought it was a lot.)

Upon opening gw2 it ran at ~3300 MHz, I let it sit in the character screen and it dropped to ~2200MHz. After entering the game I was in the Mists where it ran fairly smoothly but dropped down the ~1800MHz. Then I went into WvW. Visual lag was terrible apparent when activating pretty skills (symbols for guardians.) and the speed would drop to ~800MHz. I was also running around loading the environment if that matters.

Bus Speed is 99.7X MHz. Which I think is good?

Also, Ricky brought up the power issue, so I don’t know if it’s helpful, but the Core Voltage is at .912 V.

Would EVGA work with Radeon cards? I have a Radeon HD 6850.

If you did knock over your PC lately, most likely the cooler on the CPU got misaligned. You need to resit the heatsink.

Why? Your CPU throttle down when it is not being cool properly and overheat protection. Which is why it keeps on lowering your clock speed for lower heat output.

So I downloaded Core Temp to see if my CPU was overheating, and just a few seconds in gw2 had it up to 98C with a 100% load. Which I’m pretty sure is way too high?

I researched and found that 80C is pretty much the max for the 2500k (I have a plain 2500, but that just means it can’t be overclocked, right)

This seems to point towards my CPU not getting enough cooling, right? But when I looked inside the case while it’s running, the heatsink is still spinning. Does it matter that much whether or not it’s secured well? (I’m going to reattach it anyways.)

After reattaching the heatsink it is working a lot better. FPS doesn’t drop lower than 50, but I haven’t done a WvW guild run so there’s that…

However, the temperature is still higher than what I want. It’s been a while since I built this, should you reapply the coolant gel every so often? Do you think that it would make much of a difference?

Core speed didn’t really get up to 3300MHz, it stayed around 2600. Is that just because the game didn’t need all the power, or was the CPU throttling down because of the temp still?