1530 Performance dropoff

Hi guys. I've had my XPS 1530 for almost a year now. Love it, haven't had many questions with it, if any at all. But, over the past couple of months, I've noticed a significant dropoff in gaming performance with my 1530's 8600M GT.

The more I looked into it, the more I think it's a problem with the card downclocking itself due to high temperature. What happens is that I start say, Mass Effect, and for the most part it runs just as well as it did 3 months ago. same settings, updated drivers, etc. But the problem is, after about 20 minutes or so of playtime, the frame rate suffers dramatically, and the only way to improve that is to call up the game's main menu, or alt-tab out to desk top where there's no rendering on screen. Wait a minute or two, go back into the game only to have the bad framerate return after about 3-5 minutes.

What confuses me however, is that even though the temperatures of my GPU and CPU have increased quite a bit from 4-5 months ago, it's still not at the point where the card is heating up to any suspicious temperature range. When it was working well, my idle temp for my 8600 was around 45-55 degrees with it maxing out at around 70-75 when gaming. Whereas now, the card starts at 60 idle and tops out around 85-90 degrees, which, after digging around the net, seems to be high, but not out of the ordinary (even the Dell customer service says so).

Here are my temperature readings and some other info.

ACPI: 40-45 idle 80-85 max
CPU: 35-40 idle 75-80 max
GPU: 55-60 idle 85-90 max

Dell XPS 1530, T9300 processor, 4GB RAM, 8600M GT, running XP sp3, 185.68 drivers.

 

Is because your stock thermal paste is dead already..


I recommend replace thermal paste and undervolting if you want the lowest temps possible (and your gaming performance will be back in no time).


But your temps are fairly normal, is not like your CPU is going to die.

Terra

 

It's probably a dust build up, just give it a good hoovering or a blast with compressed air. Should at least drop your temps.