Slowdown on Vaio Z

I bought a Vaio Z a little less than half a year ago, and loved it for most of that duration unconditionally, but lately I've been seeing performance drastically deteriorate - specifically, it feels as if my GPU doesn't switch to the 330M when it does.

Initially, it seemed to work fine most of the time, but I would experience occasional slowdowns, when playing SCII (from 30-> 5 FPS slowdowns, lasting as long as ten minutes at a time, nonexistant when I first got the computer). Lately, I find a similar slowdown in WCIII, consistently, although seeming to depend on the complexity of what specifically I'm playing on it. Now, WCIII is a seven+ year old game, and I remember being able to run it on the integrated graphics for better or comparable (if my memory's too rosy) results.

I thought at first I just had some intensive software running, but I don't believe I do - I had this problem with most of my standard processes (like MSE, Ad-Aware, Mesh, the ones you'd expect to slow it down) turned off. I thought it might be a memory or a CPU issue, but I checked both while playing and both were fairly low (or when they weren't, I'd turn off processes until they were and the problem would remain). I don't really know how to be more specific than that.

Is there a significant chance that it's simply not switching GPU's despite doing the screen-flickering thing it does? Is there a good way to track what the hell is going on with it? Thank you in advance.

 

GPU-Z running in the background will show you which GPU is being used.

What is your HDD activity during these periods of slowdown? Is System Restore taking a snapshot? Is the A/V doing a full system scan? Is the RAID doing a clean up/ rebuild or something equally stupid?

 

I had the same issue before; but it was solved by changing the thermal setting to balanced/performance

 

I agree with what baronng said. If you put your Vaio into Silent mode, your Vaio will throttle the GPU/CPU in order to keep temps down so it doesn't have to spin up the fan that much. If that's not the case, then I'm not sure of the problem.

 

Guess I should've mentioned; I set the middle button between vaio and assist to switch between "Silent", "Balanced" and "Performance", and I put it on performance when I play. It's not that. And, as I mentioned both memory and CPU usage were low, and I don't believe any processes like scanning use the GPU; do they?

 

If the light above the keyboard shows "speed" then you are using the nvidia gpu.

Have you monitored temps? Sounds like you could be overheating. Or perhaps there is a process sucking up disk IO (such as virus scan)?

These things can be difficult to diagnose.

 

The light is all correct on "speed". I'll see if I can get anything useful out of it with GPU-Z. Thanks for the help so far!

 

Hrrm. It also seems to occasionally simply turn off the computer during what I suppose are relatively intensive tasks; could it just be throttling it despite the performance setting and turning off because of the heat?

And, again, since I never ran into overheating problems previously, this is puzzling; the vent on the side is also, while warm, much cooler than I've had it go previously without shutting down.

 

Might be time to take it apart to see if the heatskink is blocked with dust.

 

The only time I would get shut downs is when playing Bad Company 2 with teh GPU overclocked at too high MHZ, otherwise with a modest overclock i hover around 89-92c with safety.

 

the only problem I had with Z is the excessive heat and the fan noise

otherwise it will be perfect

 

I blew in the vent, and though I felt a few tiiiiny slowdowns, it now plays perfectly. I did not think my environment was that dusty.