When the Night’s on Fire
Yes, that’s a photo of the inside of my PC. 🙂
Anyhow, I enthusiastically took a 3 day weekend for the launch of Sims 4 Seasons, and just to have a little time off. I’d planned on coming back to this week with lots of Sim stories to share. That’s almost what happened until yesterday.
On Sunday, I was trying to slide in a little quick Ninja leveling in FFXIV. While running a Leveling dungeon with Syn, I noticed that I was having crippling lag spikes. Anyone who plays Ninja knows that lag is that job’s worst enemy.
At first, I just thought it was the game or connection. But this wasn’t the normal kind of lag spike. It felt like when you’d left a Steam game to download in the background, or something else running that was working your PC heavily. It was this kind of stuttering lag that I felt was coming from me and not my connection.
When we finished the run, Syn asked, “What’s the temps on your PC?”
I hadn’t been monitoring anything like that lately (though I should), and it’s been super hot outside (and inside) due to the summer. So I installed HWMonitor, and saw that my CPU was running at 105 C!!
I was basically boiling my poor machine and it couldn’t run straight! I had no idea!
I shut it down and opened it up. I cleaned the insides out and tested that the fans were running. Everything looked okay, though the fan on the CPU really did need a cleaning.
At first, I thought that would fix it. But when I fired up FFXIV or Sims 4 and put it under load again, it was still running at 90-100C, even with the case open and a fan pointed inside.
Bummer.
After troubleshooting it a bit and getting no fix, Syn sent me the link to a good replacement fan on Amazon. It wasn’t too expensive, and is supposed to be better than my existing fan, so I’m waiting for that to come in tomorrow. Hoping that will fix the issue.
In the meantime, no gaming on my PC. 🙁
Thankfully, I have a gaming laptop.
Though it’s nowhere near as gutsy as my PC, it can still run basic Sims and FFXIV. Just no major raids or anything too taxing. I hooked it up to my monitor, mouse and gaming keyboard, and aside from the difference in system speeds, it does more or less what I need it to in the interim.
The sad thing is that Sims is PC dependent, so the family I was building up for the previous two days are off on the main PC. All my saves, custom content and stuff are also over there. I’ve been keeping my Sims install on my laptop completely CC and mod free, so moving it all over is not much of an option.
Thankfully, the new fan has already shipped and should be here tomorrow. Hopefully that fixes the situation.
UPDATE: Replacing the fan fixed it! Woot!
Aside: I have no idea why I decided to title this post after an old Mike Oldfield song. I was trying to think up a title, and When the Night’s on Fire popped in my head. It has nothing to do with overheating PCs (When the PC’s on Fire?), so go figure.