Overheating is a favourite topic for allot of people here, lots of people say “you’re overheating” and others say “no I’m not!” but the ones that say you are never tell you how to confirm, and the ones who say they’re not, never state their temps. Thus I've come to the conclusion allot of people don't know how to find out, and those who do, can't be bothered to tell.
So, I’m writing this so you can all find out your temperatures when playing, even the ones who are crashing and have their computers shutting down, which is NOT simply a sign of overheating, it can be linked to allot of different hardware failures, just for you people who shout “OVER HEATING!” at all those people with the shutting down problem. Hopefully after this you can rule out overheating and focus on other possibilities.
-----
Get Started!
-----
So, first you need a monitoring program, there are allot out there, but I’m going to use SpeedFan. It’s small and works with Vista and usually returns an accurate temperature. So get it and install it from here:
http://www.almico.com/sfdownload.php It’s the first link after the download header.
Once you have it, load it up! Close the help box and you should see all your temperatures in a window like this:
As you can see, my GPU is running quite hot, but it isn’t hot enough to cause a hard shut down (and I don’t experience shut downs whilst playing The Sims 3 or anything else for that matter). You should really be aiming for a temperature of under 55°c on a desktop and under 70°c on a laptop whilst it’s idle (doing nothing and that means nothing, no net, msn, nothing). Under full load (use 3Dmark
here to strain your computer and see the temp increase) you should be under 65°c on a desktop and under 85°c on a laptop.
--Notes, nothing to important-----
The difference in temps on a laptop and desktop is simply the air flow. Most laptops only have 1 fan and it’s placed on the heat sink of the CPU, thus the GPU runs hotter. For those with desktops, I have 2 ATI HD3780’s in CrossFire and they both remain under 50°c whilst playing Crysis with all options at max for over 40 minutes, my CPU remains at under 45°c (and 35 when idle). Oh and the screenshot of the temperatures are from Lozzykinz’s laptop, it’s an Acer Aspire 31g with a 2.0Ghz Core 2 Duo T8500 (according to windows and DX), GeForce 8600m GS 512MB and 4GB RAM. I once had an Alienware with a GeForce 6800GO, it used to run at 70°c average when playing any game, quality settings made no difference and ran at around 60°c when idle, just so you know some cards get hotter than others, especially in laptops.
Remember, location plays a part in cooling too, if you live in the soggy UK you'll probably experience cooler temperatures than the lucky gits in the sunny parts of America.
---------------------------------------
If you’d like to find what temperature your CPU and GPU should be running at usually you can head to
Toms Hardware, that site has tested pretty much everything and you should be able to find at least one page with your CPU/GPU’s usual temperatures.
With all that out of the way, let’s start seeing what happens in The Sims 3. Open you SpeedFan program to the window shown above (First pic) and click the ‘Configure button. If you click one of the tags you should see options at the bottom like in this image:
You need to go down the list of items and tick the ‘Logged’ check box at the bottom for each tag.
After that is done, at the top where the tabs are, click the ‘Log’ tab to open the log options. You need the tick the ‘Enabled’ option to turn on logging. After you’ve done that, click OK and minimize SpeedFan. You should still see an icon in the system tray similar to the one in this picture:
Okay, make sure all your internet is closed and start up your Sims and wait for it to crash/shut down your computer!
------
Finding your results.
------
The temperature logs are located in the install directory, the default path is “C:\Program Files\SpeedFan\”
If you don’t know how to get there, read on, if you do skip this paragraph. So, open My Computer (or Computer as it is now known in Vista) from either the desktop or start menu (on Vista) You should see your Hard Disk Drives (HDD), open the one labelled ‘Local Disc (C: )’ then enter the folder ‘Program Files’. If you’re on Vista it may yell at you and say ‘don’t go into the files! You’ll kill me! Etc, etc”. Tell it to get lost and show the files, then scroll down until you see ‘SpeedFan’. Open that file.
------
Inside the SpeedFan directory you’ll find some files like this ‘SFLog20090619-0001.csv’ These are the log files. So ‘SFLog’ is the log, ‘20090619’ is the date and the ‘-0001’ is the number of the log. You want to find today’s date (should be the only ones there) and you want to open the newest log file which is the one with the biggest number, e.g./ mine is ‘-0005’. Double click to open it, windows will have a small attack and tell you it doesn’t know what to do with it, it’s okay, click ‘open with installed program’ (second option) and select ‘Notepad’ as the program to open it with. You should then see a list of all you temperatures in time order. Scroll all the way to the bottom to find the last reported temperatures before your crash/reboot. I can see by scrolling down at the hottest component is my GPU and the highest temperature it has reached is 68°c after playing The Sims 3 for around 40 minutes. That’s pretty normal on a laptop, on a desktop you should be looking allot lower.
So there you go, you can see what your temperatures where before you computer died, each component has a different cut out temperature, some CPU’s can reach into 90°c before they start throttling, whilst others cut power to protect themselves if they hit above 100°c, either way, computers like to stay cool. So hopefully you can now determine if any of the computer shut downs are due to overheating, and if they aren’t, well there’s still other hardware possibilities such are defective/lack of RAM. Example, Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl requires a minimum of 1GB of RAM, however, from experiences (particularly with ATI Graphics) 1GB of RAM causes the computer to shut down, upping to 2GB solves the problem, yet the problem doesn’t effect many Nvidia owners and certain ATI cards, random and strange and never fixed (it was assumed to be one of several memory leaks that never got fixed).
-----
Hard Drisk Drive
-----
Another problem could be a faulty HDD, although it would normally result in a Blue Screen or a crash (and you’d notice the hard drive going crazy on other applications too) and not a power cut. It is a possibility for those suffering crashes where the screen goes black and you can still Alt+Tab out of the game.
-----
Power Supply
-----
A Power Supply degrades in efficiency over time, a lack of power to components can trigger crashes or power cuts. You can use a power calculator such as the one
here to work out what output you'd likely need for your computer. You should add about 150W to the result to compensate the PSU degrading.*
-----
A simple test to determine if it your PSU:
-----
Try unplugging everything from you Desktop and just leave the bare essentials connected (im talking internal components, modems, sound cards etc, not keyboard and mouse). Test again. Still happens, don’t rule it out fully, but it is unlikely. If you have a friend with a computer, ask if you can steal his/her PSU for the day and test it in yours, the newer the better. My PSU blew last week and I’m currently using a 5 year old 400W power supply to power my computer (only one HD3870 is connected, 1x DVD Drive everything else is out) and it is, much to my amusement, working better than the 800W one that just blew. My sister is currently playing The Sims 3 on it with very little trouble.
-----
End Notes
-----
So, don’t give up hope, chin up, test everything and eliminate hardware failures where you can, if you find that everything is running fine (and don’t use “every other game runs fine” as proof, believe me, it isn’t) then it can be put down to the game. If it is the game, it will get patched eventually and won’t cost you anything. And at least now when someone says “You’re over heating!” in massive capital letters and yells at you, you can correct them and calmly tell them the highest temperature you components have reached whilst playing The Sims 3.
Good luck and I hope this helps
--NaytoE
(The Sim murdering B/F of Lozzykinz)
PS./ If anyone wants to write a guide on how to check the efficiency of your hard drive please post a comment here and I’ll add a link to it
Same for RAM tests and the like.
------------------------------
*Thanks to Birdbeast for reminding me of the Power calculator websites
Edit:
-Added PowerSupply Calculator link
-Ammended Temperatures
-Spelling
![[line_separator]](/jforum/templates/sims3/images/line_separator.gif)
![[Search]](/jforum/templates/sims3/images/icon_mini_search.gif){kind=icon}
![[Recent Topics]](/jforum/templates/sims3/images/icon_mini_recentTopics.gif){kind=icon}
![[Members]](/jforum/templates/sims3/images/icon_mini_members.gif){kind=icon}
![[Groups]](/jforum/templates/sims3/images/icon_mini_groups.gif){kind=icon}
![[Post New]](/jforum/templates/sims3/images/icon_minipost_new.gif){kind=icon}
![[Click to report this thread]](/jforum/templates/sims3/images/info-16x16.gif)
![[Up]](/jforum/templates/sims3/images/icon_up.gif){kind=icon}
... According to his page (GeForce 8800 GTS (512 MB) 60C (idle at vista desktop) 86(Mass effect 3d)) Im within the normal range. 
I'm the one who gets stuck with fixing her computer troubles 
Unfortunately, these Sims 3 crashes are pretty much out of my hands, all I can suggest to her is to improve the cooling and see if it makes a difference, I can't see that it will as it's not getting hot to the point where it's throttling the performance or causing any harm, X3's temperature kinda proves that and the fact that the temperature had lowered due to being idle, not throttling and it still crashed.
