[No I am not mad bro.]

Hi everyone. I am new to this forum so apologies if this is in the wrong place. Anyway, I have a problem with GTA on my laptop. It's been happening for a while now and I can't cope with it any longer. My laptop plays this game well on high setting with L3EVO 8-7 ENB. But after 10-15 minutes it lags very badly, down to about 5 FPS it can be anything from 10 seconds to 5 minutes until it speeds back up again. I tried using speed fan to check my temperatures. Just Alt + Tab out of the game when it lags. Simple. Not quite.... If I run speed fan the game doesn't lag at all. Runs silky smooth for 10-15 minutes same as before then BOOM. Laptop shuts off without warning. I have tried many things and can't rectify this problem. I have a laptop cooling pad but it makes no difference whether its on or off. Sorry for the long post. I can't really explain it any other way. Thanks in advance!

[mkey82]

Most probably an overheating issue, you can check your temps with an application like hardware monitor, but probably in the long run, if you value that laptop, you'll want to skip playing GTAIV on it.

[No I am not mad bro.]

Thanks for the reply. I'm not sure what temperatures my CPU and GPU are supposed to be at. At Idle everything is at 50 degrees except my GPU which is around 57-63. Will test what they are when playing with hardware monitor. And also, if I can't fix it and need to stop playing games on my laptop I was thinking about upgrading my old desktop. Would this be good enough to run smoothly?
Intel core 2 quad @ ?? (need to check)
3GB ram. (thinking of upgrading to around 6GB)
Nvidia Evga 550ti 1Gb (At the moment it's a crappy ATi card with around 256MB of memory)
Not the best spec, I know but this is all I can get with my budget.
Thanks. Hopefully though I can get this problem sorted so I don't have to buy upgrades for my other PC yet. (I want to save up and build a much better PC). Thanks again

[mkey82]

You should check your temperatures and get more details on your desktop specs.

[No I am not mad bro.]

My temperatures while playing are: CPU is around 60 degrees GPU is 80-90 degrees. I can't get specs on my other PC at the moment as it's in use. (friends and family) But the specs of my laptop which I use to play are Intel Core i3 M370 @ 2.49Ghz, 4GB Ram, ATi mobility radeon 550V HD 1GB, 500GB HDD. Thank you so much for your help.

[No I am not mad bro.]

Anybody know how to fix it?

[No I am not mad bro.]

Anyone? I'm downloading catalyst 12.2 to see if that will help. If it is a heat problem what can I do to fix it? I already have a cooling pad but it makes no difference. Sometimes i'm wondering if it's blowing the hot air back in!

[Dr. John13]

Don't post thrice in a row. Close any useless program. Your PC might have been getting burdened or else try a commandline.txt. I would love to give my commandline but some say it doesn't works. Sorry but for preview:

CODE

-norestrictions -availablevidmem 5.0 -percentvidmem 100 -DX9 /low   -frameLimit 0 -nomemrestrict -novblank -noprecache -minspecaudio

If you get heating problem, lover the units of availablevidmem part. (Around 2.0 - 3.0)

I think your PC can't sustain the CPU which GTA 4 uses. You better upgrade your PC or else your laptop will fry.

[No I am not mad bro.]

Sorry. I won't in future. Thanks for the commandline. Will give it a go. Installing the catalyst 12.2 as well. One thing I don't understand is that it lags after about 2-5 minutes of playing and then after anything from 10-60 seconds it runs great again for about 30 seconds then it repeats. Removed the ENB as it used 0.82 which could cause overheating and switched to 0.77b and it ran better and ran for longer but still lagged same as before. I have now completely removed ENB and get better performance but still the same lag.

[mkey82]

The system takes a few minutes to overheat then the CPU protects itself by reducing the clock speed and thus starts cooling down. Then it throttles the speed back up only to face more overheating. So the cycle continues, as it throttles you gain and lose processing power/performance.

[No I am not mad bro.]

Sorry for the late reply. My internet has been terrible recently i've been struggling to load pages. The new catlyst drivers and your commandline did the trick. Thanks! I also tried to blow out all the dust from the laptop. I blew into the vents and although I saw no dust come out it's fixed the throttling issue. I can feel more air coming out the vents now. Thanks for your help Dr. John and mkey