2012-10-21, 04:50 PM
Flonne Wrote:This is a clean OS install. And, it hasn't ever shut off on COMPLETE idle, as in, when I was asleep or something, but beyond that, I've had it shut down when just browsing the internet at the same...well, hmmm, actually now that I think of it, Dolphin is heavily CPU intensive and it seems to crash a lot more often when I'm playing Xenoblade...it may be the CPU overheating. That would not surprise me; I've had this CPU for 7 years, and it is CONSISTENTLY 5-10 degrees above factory recommended, and as many as 20 degrees over when doing something CPU intensive. Could be that it's just finally breaking down. If it can hold out a few more weeks, I'll have enough money to replace it, but to replace it I have to replace the motherboard because the socket type is now obsolete...and if I replace the motherboard, I need to replace the RAM, because my current RAM is DDR2, I doubt that's still supported either.
yeah any major upgrades from this point will be on a new platform, new ram, and new cpu, which will be moderately costly. What temperatures is the cpu running at. if temperatures are a problem, clean out the heat sink, if not buy a new heat sink entirely. Assuming you are using a stock heat sink, because stock heat sinks arent very efficient at spreading heat. and the older the processor, the less efficient per watt its most likely going to be.
If you did end up buying a new build, take note that there is a possibility of ram changing to DDR4 in 2014. On top of the fact that AMD is lagging behind in gaming cpu performance to price(will perform only slightly better then what you have now at stock), whereas intel keeps changing sockets, and ivy bridge is the last lga 1155 socket cpu, and is moving onto 1150 on haswells release in q3 2013. If you were to buy a build, I would recommend buying parts used if possible.