Find cause of lag

I play lan games with one or two friends at a time. This weekend we were playing SoaSE and my view kept freezing for a couple of seconds and would then resume. How can I track down the source of this stutter? My machine, or his machine? My video card or my network connection or my memory?

 

It would help if u listed the system configs, the game u play, etc..

 

Yep. Please list up your system, and does this happend just all the time over and over again? Or does it happend randomly or what?

 

My machine is a Qosmio X505-894.
•Intel® Core™ i7-740QM processor
•Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)
•18.4" widescreen
•4GB DDR3 1066MHz memory
•500GB HDD (7200rpm)
•1.5GB GDDR5 NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 460M

His is a Sager with a core 2 duo cpu and nvidia 9800go gpu. I don't know his exact specs. I just got my laptop, he's had his for about three years now. His doesn't usually lag us up. BUT, this is the first time we tried this game in a LAN (wireless) environment.

Once it started to stutter it seemed to get worse as time went on. And both of us were doing it.

I just want to be able to identify the cause. Maybe a background monitoring program or a network sniffer to see if we are dropping our connection, something like that. I believe that our machines should be able to handle this game.

 

There are ridiculous slowdowns when you get diplomacy messages. Like you have 30 fps, then 1 sentence appears on the screen and the fps drops to 5 lol.

 

I think it can be the modem. Or, who was the Host? Does does also effect in some games.

 

Maybe you're experiencing a throttling issue... See here if you don't know what I mean: http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m15x/439546-aw-m15x-throttling-issue-investigation-stock-clocks-overclocked.html
Best way to find out is to monitor your GPU clocks and to be on the safe side the CPU speed too... just check the pictures in the link above and you'll understand what you have to look for... periodical drops of the clock speed.

 

No modem, wireless lan. We make a day of it, pizza, beer, games.

I don't think it's throttling, it started late in the game so maybe it's just too much going on, but too much for which computer and what part of that computer?

Any recommendations for how to monitor the clocks?

 

this sounds like a problem with the game, not the computer or the connection. apparently fast quad core systems can't handle the game past a certain point. similar to civilization 5... the game just gets to be too much as it evolves.