[Adrenalin]

Heellooo again,

After endlessly searching through some Age Of Empires 3 sites and forums I am back at GTG. Fancy that. The only site that seems to understand what you're talking about and give you a simple answer.

So when I play AOE3 my CPU usage goes to 100%. There's a million people asking the same question as me online and the standard answer is "The game requires that much"

Rubbish. I have played the game fine before when it first came out and none of that ever happened.

I've got a 3.0Ghz chip, 4GB ram, a NVidia 8600GT PCI-E.

Anyone got any ideas please? I'm at my wits end.

Installed all updates, 1.12 patch, new directX, even tried uninstalling the entire game and re-installing it. No hope.

Thanks!!

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so your only issue is that your system is running at 100% cpu cycles?

[starjax]

so your only issue is that your system is running at 100% cpu cycles?

[Adrenalin]

Well, yes it does. The game will run at lightning speed without a glitch, then all of a sudden it will slow down and the frame rates will go down. I'm not sure if it's the graphics card overheating or slowing down when it gets to hot or the CPU but they both seem to go a bit higher when i play the game.

CPU goes from about 35 to 45 and the graphics card goes from about 100 to 110-120.

Seems quite hot to me for a graphics card...

[stettybet0]

Are those temperatures in Celsius? If so, then that's your problem. The 8600GT automatically throttles itself when the temperature reaches ~120C, so that would produce a noticeable drop in performance. 100C is very high for an idle temperature, as well. Is the fan on the graphics card working?

[Adrenalin]

WELL! Straight after reading your reply, i looked at my fan, then looked at it again.... only to see that it had FALLEN OFF! Oh my good heaven, the second NVidia fan that has ceased to function! I'm surprised that the GPU itself hadn't melted. It's probably been like that for about 3 weeks? It had ceased. So, off I took it, got a new fan, ran Everest, and it goes to 50 degrees celcius. That sounds way better than 120 eh?

So anyway, thanks to everybody that replied! Appreciated...

Hopefully I can go buy a decent fan to keep it under 30 or something.

[jt1990]

Antec makes some nice GPU cooling units - they don't go on the card, but they sit next to the card and cycle air through. Check out the Super Cyclone Blower or the VCool fans and see if that does what you need.

[Adrenalin]

jt1990,

thanks. VCool looks amazing! Go nicely with my Thermaltake PSU. Think I might consider this hey.