G73JH-BST7 has suddeny become sluggish in gaming performance!

Hi all,

I've had this G73JH for about 14 months now, and it's been treating me well up to recently for all my games (BF3, skyrim, to name a few). However, after moving from Singapore to Australia and bringing the laptop as carry-on baggage, the framerate across all my games has decreased significantly.

In BF3, for example, I'm stuck playing metro at about 15 fps average, worsening when you hit point B (sorry for the BF3 specific example!). In conquest large maps, I get about 5 fps when i look across the map.

I've tried running furmark, along with my girlfriend's G73jh-bst7 side-by-side, and the framerate seemed on par until hitting a certain temperature (around 80*C), at which the graphics would freeze for about half a second on and off, giving a reading of 1 fps.

Although the furmark test showed the performance hitch, it was a little strange seeing as my framerate in games has been reduced across all temps. However, the momentary freezes also happen in particularly demanding situations while gaming.

I've tried reinstalling the ATI drivers, as well as testing my HD for errors with HDTune, and looking at CPU & RAM performance (with basic windows tools) and nothing seems out of the ordinary when compared to my gf's g73.

The only traumatic thing I might've done recently to this computer - besides the airplane ride - is opening it up for a good dusting last month, but I did lots of gaming after that and never noticed any problems.

For some weird reason, my gf's G73 is troubling her too. Her HDD is beginning to die off as well (she got a WD one, while mine came with a seagate ). Must be something with best buy models , but I'm buying a new SSD in time for her birthday! On a side note: any thoughts on OCZ agility 3 for use on the G73?

Thanks in advance for advice, and reading the wall of text

 

Not to overlook the obvious, but is Power4Gear running in High Performance mode? If you are running the power4gear in a mobility mode it might be throttling somewhere.

 

Also clean out your vents..

Maybe you have gotten some new dust that has slown things down..

 

The CPU may throttle, but the GPU definitely will not, AMD GPUs run at the full clock speeds and then shutdown rather than throttle usually.

 

I reinstalled power4gear and disabled core parking in an effort to bring some life back, and that's what made bf3 remotely playable again, but only in Metro. It's still obviously nowhere near what it used to be.

E: I should say I have installed and used power4gear (at the right setting!!) in an effort to get things working again. I had uninstalled it earlier last year, prior to all this happening, with no effect on performance!

I'll try that out on as soon as i can tomorrow. Uni life hasn't left much free time to fix these things, much less actually game, sadly.

On a similar note, my temps are idling at about 55*C, only a few degrees higher than when it was freshly dusted, so didn't really think temp was an issue (wrong assumption to make? )

I did notice that GPU clocks and voltage, as reported by GPU observer, read correctly at 700/1000/1.15v whilst gaming. I guess I need to look more closely at what my CPU is doing then. Is there any tool I can use to record and read CPU parameters over a period of time, or just benchmark it with a quantified result?

Does this mean then that you think the CPU is the main culprit in this issue? Sorry if it seems like a no-brainer My knowledge of computers is elementary and even installing an OS for the new SSD will be a first, to give you guys an idea of how elementary..

Really appreciate the responses thus far!

 

You can use throttlestop to monitor your CPU, then run one of the games where you are experiencing slowdowns then check the log.

How to use TS: http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...arket-upgrades/531329-throttlestop-guide.html

 

I've made some quick logs of CPU performance using TS, comparing my own affected laptop and my friend's identical G73 (that I plugged my HDD into). The logs were made while playing Skyrim, in identical locations and using the same save file.

Here is the text file: View attachment ThrottleStopLog Comparison.txt

I've also taken a picture each showing the readings off CPU meter, GPU observer and the framerates. *click for big*
The working one
The sluggish one

Although using TS stopped the brief and repeated freezing, it seems like a couple of cores still refuse to kick in while playing. There's also some differences in RAM usage and GPU load that I noticed throughout the testing.

I'm still at a loss for what to do and I really hope I can get things working by may 15 Thanks for the input thus far, Tijo!

 

I've gone ahead and done a clean install of windows, which went well except that my computer freezes completely, seemingly at random, and I need to do a hard shutdown to get it working.

However, regarding the issue of performance, IT STILL HAS THE SAME PROBLEMS AS BEFORE

I'll soon try opening my baby up and seeing if the connections are ok. No, not an actual baby. The laptop .

If anyone could have a look at my previous post and make some sense of those numbers/comparisons, i would be eternally grateful.

 

I opened up my lappy and gave it a good dusting one more time, and made sure the area around the cores were clean, but that didn't make a difference to the performance.

HOWEVER, I did some googling and found a piece of advice saying to run WEI assessment tool. I did that and it's now in full working order .

WEIrdest fix ever

 

That is a strange fix. Thanks for posting.