(PCGT VI) It's not just about hardware

I've got Rimworld and really like it, but find it weird that it never seems to really drop in price. I managed to snag it for a cheap price via Russian GoG.com through a VPN a while back, but the retail price in the UK always seems to be quite high for a game of that age even when it's on sale.

Jedi fallen order and Totalwar: Warhammer are the prime games available for free.

Lagamorph wrote:I've got Rimworld and really like it, but find it weird that it never seems to really drop in price. I managed to snag it for a cheap price via Russian GoG.com through a VPN a while back, but the retail price in the UK always seems to be quite high for a game of that age even when it's on sale.

I’ve just done this with Epic Turkey. Looks a game right up my street. Looks crazy and probably a massive time sink.

It’s also why I’m not touching jawas game commitment thread. I buy games when cheap/on offer and then work out what I fancy.

At this point I'll continue to wait until Rimworld is £15 or less or turns up on Humble Choice.

Well, I bought it, and played it for a bit. My merry band of tutorial people didn’t last long. A crazed raccoon came in to camp and attacked our farmer/cook. Chased him for miles out of the camp. Sent our hunter out to save him. After a full day and night of pursuit, she caught up with them, missed the shot and hit the cook, then killed the raccoon. The cook bled out in his bed overnight after struggling to make it home. Couldn’t maintain the camp with the two remaining, so set the hunter to kill the other, then suicide by wildlife by going to punch a rhino in a face. Just as she was taking her last breath, another survivor shows up to join the camp, is instantly flattened by the raging beast, and game over.

It was a bit slow going, to be honest, wished there was a little more to do while watching the simulation play out.

Managed to order an RTX 3070 FE last night! :toot:

Afrocat wrote:Managed to order an RTX 3070 FE last night!

Nice one.

It arrived this morning. Popped it in and booted up BF 2042 to check everything is working correctly, and... it looks like there might be a cooling issue with the card. Hotspot shot over 100°C almost immediately, nearly 30°C over the GPU readout :fp:

This is without the side panel on my case too. This can't be right can it?

Wow. Are the fans spinning? You got any software limiting fan curve? You can try MSI afterburner and just check fans are 100%.

It’s hit that, it’ll be thermal throttling.

Just checked, fans look weird and GPU utilisation is low.

What card did you have before?

Listen to the bertie. He was very helpful when I had a similar issue

Which I definitely didn't solve by taking off the side panel...

How much space is 8nside the case? That's what the issue with mine came down to. These new cards are real chonka's and mine sat very close to my cpu cooler.

Give us some more info and we can give you some ideas.

Bertie wrote:Wow. Are the fans spinning? You got any software limiting fan curve? You can try MSI afterburner and just check fans are 100%.

It’s hit that, it’ll be thermal throttling.

Fans were spinning in-game, but did seem to ramp up and down a lot which was odd. I turned off the fan curve I was using on my old card and closed afterburner, so should be stock settings.

If I set fans to 100% in Afterburner they seem to max out at 3782RPM, so not sure how they got so fast before?? It doesn't seem to respond to the fan curve at all if I have it set to firmware mode, I have to use software mode. Running BF2042 at 100% fans and the hotspot seems to max out in the early 80s which is a lot less scary.

Bertie wrote:Just checked, fans look weird and GPU utilisation is low.

What card did you have before?

Never noticed the utilisation... I cranked the settings to ultra and was getting 60fps@1440p (albeit with some dips) which seems unlikely at 28.5% utilisation? Using the Nvidia performance overlay it shows high 90s GPU Utilisation.

Coming from a GTX 1060 6GB.

I've just done a clean re-installation of the latest driver (probably should have done that in the first place :shifty:

). Played for 10-15 mins on stock fan curve again and temps are a little high but definitely less outrageous.

Looks like fans barely touched 50% speed so with a custom curve I think it should be fine now? Weirdly it looks like HWMonitor stopped capturing utilisation min/max after I reset it... maybe that's just bugged.

So looks much better.

BF2042 is terrible for GPU utilisation as it’s CPU bottlenecked. What CPU you you got? My mates have better cards than my 3070 and they don’t hit 100% on the GPU unless they go native res. DLSS on makes you even more CPU bottlenecked. The only stuff maxing out GPUs are 8 core + CPUs, 12th Gen Intel and 5800x +.

You could run a 3D mark and just check you get the right score for your hardware. There is a nice comparison tool there.

Temps look ok. As albear suggested, good cool air flow coming in? These 3000 series cards pull more power than those 1000 series, so good flow in helps.

Fan curves, in MSI afterburner, you should be able to set them to 100% and just check they spin up. Then under one of the tabs you can specify a fan curve.

If after all of this you still want to lower temps, you can undervolt the card to lower power and temps. You can’t break the card, but in afterburner you can set a clock speed for a set voltage which actually will improve your stock performance and give you better temps. But have a read up first.

https://youtu.be/FqpfYTi43TE

The 3070 FE definitely runs much louder and hotter than I was used to with a Gigabyte 1060 but from what I read that might be to be expected compared to the aftermarket cards?

My card seems fine at least after a few months but might be worth me checking into it.

From your image, you can see max voltage is 1.081 and 220w.

You need to find the stable clock speed. But the concept is you set the voltage at say 0.925 or 0.95v and find the clock speed that works (cntrl + F) say 1900Mhz. It will lower power and voltage, and therefore temps. Should be a small increase from stock performance.

I have good cooling in, so I push the overclock on mine. But undervolting can drastically reduce temps with minimal impact on performance, or slight improvements from stock.

While testing undervolts. Click the little button off to make sure afterburner doesnt apply the profile on start up. Once you are happy with it, looks stable, put it back on to apply your undervolt on start up.

Ignoring the comparison between the games as I haven't played Back 4 Blood, I wish old Valve was still around to produce so many great games.

Oh and I'm stilled pissed at Silva for abandoning me to the tank at the end of Swamp Fever on Expert Realism after I picked him up 50 metres from the boat.

Back 4 Blood could be a decent game if it wasn't so crushingly hard.
When you have a huge majority of the player base who can't even beat the game on normal and just quit you have a problem.

The game is seemingly aimed at the sweaty tryhards of the world and for people who grind like hell for the perfect builds. Chalky, Fade and I finally managed to complete it on easy but even that took ages with loads of restarts as even easy is stupidly hard.

The enemies just swarm you with elite guys who you have zero hope of killing and it's just not fun to be jumped on by an elite you didn't even have a hope of seeing.

If the game was even slightly fair we'd play it again but it just isn't and yet the usual suspects who'll just shout "Get gud" will defend this broken mess.

(PCGT VI) It's not just about hardware

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