Continual Overheating Crash

[Gideon_Slack]

Hi. I just started playing the game again after a long absence. Everything has been fine the last few days. But starting tonight about 2 hours ago, I started getting pretty constant crashes: about once every ten minutes.

On rebooting, the error message said these were because of CPU overheating.

I downloaded a program to limit my fps (to 45) but I still got a crash because of overheating.

My Specs:

Pentium 4 (3.8 GHz)
Nvidia Geoforce 9500 GT
3 Gigs DDR Ram.
Windows XP SP 3

I know P4's have a reputation for running hot. But the only other game I had overheating problems in, I was able to solve them by limiting fps. Not sure what is happening here. Is this just a matter of shutting my computer down for a while?

[Kianoni]

I'd suggest to install some kind of hardware monitor that can monitor temperature in real time, then play regnum in windowed mode and see what the actual temperature is.
You might also check CPU usage inside regnum (alt+i), check your computer fans, clean dust inside your computer and if nothing else helps one might consider under-clocking the CPU from BIOS if nothing else helps. I had the same problem on my linux box but fortunately Plovers FPS limiter did the job for me.

[Gideon_Slack]

Originally Posted by Kianoni

I'd suggest to install some kind of hardware monitor that can monitor temperature in real time, then play regnum in windowed mode and see what the actual temperature is.
You might also check CPU usage inside regnum (alt+i), check your computer fans, clean dust inside your computer and if nothing else helps one might consider under-clocking the CPU from BIOS if nothing else helps. I had the same problem on my linux box but fortunately Plovers FPS limiter did the job for me.

Thanks for the tip. On my Windows parition, I turned all graphics settings down to 0 except animations and view distance (with terrain =0). I also used a 3rd party program to limit fps to 45. CPU usage (from the Alt-i menu) is at 100% most of the time even though fps was limited successfully. Still lots of crashes.

The crashes seem to happen after situations involving a lot of player toons. It first happened in a group fight against the dragon, and then after some fort wars. Just grinding normal mobs or small group activity doesn't seem to effect it.

I tried it once on my Linux parition, and also had an overheat and crash. I will download the Linux fps limiter and see if that will help.

[Gideon_Slack]

Some more info on the Windows XP overheating problem.

The Alt-i window indicates RO is using 100% of the CPU. Yet if I have the Task Manager/Processes tab open at the same time, it only shows the RO executable using at most 50-60% of the CPU. The remaining 40% is taken up by the System Idle Process, which I assume means 40% of the CPU is free.

Should these numbers be different?

Edited to add: The Pentium 4 is a single core processor but it has hyperthreading. When I go into Set Affinity for RoClientGame.exe is shows me two CPUs: CPU 0 and CPU 1, both selected (which I assume means threads instead of actual cores). Could this threading setup be causing any problems?

[Gideon_Slack]

Update:

The Pentium 4 has hyperthreading which are essentially virtual cores (simultaneous multithread processing).

I turned off hyperthreading in the bios, and now the % of the cpu RO uses in the Task Manager and in the RO client are the same (both hovering around 75-95%) in active use.

The problem may be that P4 hyperthreading limits the RO client to only 50% of the cpu maximum. I will test this some more.

[Gideon_Slack]

So far so good. With hyperthreading turned off, the RO client runs about 20 degrees celcius cooler, well out of the danger zone. Hopefully this will prevent future overheatings.