Gaming problems fixed

Yeah, so it wasn't so much the USB headphones that were causing my gaming problems. I assumed it was CPU related because I've noticed a number of other things bogging down when there was heavy audio usage, not just in Day of Defeat:Source. Other games, like Civilization 4 would massively slow down the longer I played, especially on huge maps, and some games that used to be playable weren't so playable any more. But I've found the problem, and it is now fixed, albeit temporarily.

The problem was dust. Yep, good old-fashioned dust. I hadn't cleaned out the inside of that machine for quite some time, and the heat-sink on the GPU (among other things) was simply caked with dust. So I took the card out, vacuumed everything really well, plugged it back in, and there she was. Working just fine.

After my initial post on the problem last night I got to wondering what my GPU temperatures were like. The CPU temp was fine, that much I knew in advance, but I didn't have any real way of checking the GPU temp. So I did a little searching and found a handy-dandy little utility called GPU-Z that is basically a video card info tool, ran it, and just about shit myself when I saw that the idle temp while doing absolutely nothing was 80 degrees Celsius. That obviously wasn't going to cut it, so I went to bed, slept like hell because I kept wishing I'd fixed the problem before going to bed, then got up and first thing I did was take a good look inside the case.

Yuck. It wasn't pretty. I had good airflow into the chassis itself because I have the sides & top off the box, but the machine was down on the floor and pretty much out of sight most of the time, so I had no idea how dirty it was in there. Took me just a few minutes to vacuum all the dirt and dust out, put my video card back in and fire it up. Instantly I noticed that the temp came down to about 55 degrees. It rose to about 60 degrees after a few minutes, but then it pretty much leveled off. Now, one thing I did notice in the monitoring software is that the fan speed was locked at 26% regardless of the GPU temperature, but I don't know if that's actually the case or just bad reporting on the part of the hardware or software. Just to be on the safe side, though I set a little box fan beside the case and I've got it blowing air directly inside, cooling everything off, and now my temp is holding steady at 55 degrees.

Personally, I'd like it to be a little cooler so maybe later on today I'll take the card out, pop the cover off the heat-sink, and do a more thorough job of cleaning it out, but at least now I know what my problem was. I'm much, much happier now, and will probably sleep better tonight knowing that I won't have to worry about upgrading my hardware anytime soon.

Oh, and another thing. I ran a test by playing the Left 4 Dead 2 demo with the video settings on high, and while I didn't get great framerates, it was definitely playable with no lagging or stuttering. Yesterday, I couldn't even play it with the video settings set on low. But I managed to play through the entire demo with no problems today, so that's really all I can ask. Now we'll see how Flight Simulator X responds to my newly cool video card :)