GTX 1650 Super intermittent lag problem in one game
Posted: 27 Feb 2024, 20:17
Ok so I have been having a weird issue for about a year with the cheaply made HP OEM 1650S in my gaming rig (or shall I say, gaming rustbucket). In one game in particular, specifically "The Suicide of Rachel Foster", the GPU runs it smoothly for a few seconds then suddenly lags for a second and switches into perfcap reason idle (when running properly it shows it is power cause well power limit of course) and then returns to normal repeats this over and over so much it is unbearable to play. I tried installing drivers straight from Nvidia after this first happened, no fix. New thermal paste TWICE (first time I put MX-6 which rapidly pumped out and caused an overheating problem I recently fixed with GC Extreme paste) cause the stock stuff both dried out and pumped off the chip die in less than 3 years of use. Disabled the overclock on the core and memory. No dice. Fresh Windows 10 LTSC install last summer after Win11 finally gave me the last instability straw when it rendered itself almost fully useless due to breaking ExplorerPatcher... STILL DOES THE SAME THING. It did it on one or two occasions in other games but never again, it doesn't do it in Furmark, and consistently does it past certain low resolutions in the affected game. I am at a loss. Only indicator of trouble is the combination of that idle-dip that causes the lag and the fact that if the heat on the back of the GPU is anything to go by when looked at through my FLIR camera, two of the memory chips are running quite a bit hotter than the others. Also, the PCB is slightly heat warped cause the original paste was garbage even when new and I didn't change it until I couldn't game throttle-free in a warm-ish room even with the temp limit increased to 87C so the board took over the role of heatsink and mildly cooked cause of that garbage HP paste. Anyone have an idea of what could be wrong? I know I can just play this game on my much more powerful laptop but it's annoying that my desktop can't do it and I really don't wanna put money into this rust bucket unless something breaks fully before I can afford to build a proper rig.
Edit: current area of suspicion is that VRAM that's running hot, if my electrical engineering background is worth anything that indicates some kind of chip degradation problem likely due to the heatsink only being made to cool the GPU.
Edit: current area of suspicion is that VRAM that's running hot, if my electrical engineering background is worth anything that indicates some kind of chip degradation problem likely due to the heatsink only being made to cool the GPU.