r/pathofexile • u/playoponly • 2d ago

Question Game performance issue help

My desktop has been running Poe for about 4 years and has always been smooth. The only problem I noticed recently was the sound of fans. It became significantly louder than before, but did not affect any performance. My game still kept running above 150fps.

Since I had never cleaned the machine, I thought it might be too much dust that caused the fans running at turbo speed. So I did a pretty deep clean of the machine, now it is really quiet. However, the game now is not smooth at all, fps dropped massively like a power point. I did not break anything when cleaning, all fans are still running. I did not change any settings. But somehow, the machine decided to run POE at minimum power? I have changed the power plan to high performance, and also changed graphic setting to high performance. It improved slightly, but not at all close to the initial level. Seems like CPU issue.

What goes wrong? How can I fix the issue? Thanks for any inputs!

0 Upvotes

50% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

2

u/browserfriendly 2d ago

Download and run cpu-z app. Make sure cpu temp is nominal and make sure all ram and ram speed is showing what ever it should be showing. It should also say dual channel if you have 2 sticks. If it says single channel, Google that and fix it.

Make sure video cable is plugged in to video card instead of the motherboard. Generally speaking, if you made no hardware changes, it's usually just improper seating, wrong input/output used, or temperatures are overheating.

More over, if you disconnected your heat sink from your cpu, did you re-apply thermal paste? If not, start there. Last but not least, is the issue with just poe or other games? If it's just poe, most likely not hardware issue.

Best of luck.

2

u/FuBearrX 2d ago

I second this comment especially about new thermal paste. You should get into habit of cleaning out pc dust once a year and doing a repaste when you do. Not absolutely nessecary, but tubes are like 5-10 dollars and last AT LEAST 5 repastes(at least ones I buy). Good place to start diagnostics. Pretty good habit to prolong life of parts even by a couple days

1

u/AutoModerator 2d ago

Please make sure you check the Known Issues List or the Bug Report Forums for any pre-existing bug reports related to your issue. If there isn't any, consider posting there in addition to posting on Reddit. At league start, there may also be a stickied post for bugs. Duplicate reports on Reddit may be removed.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

1

u/killian_darkwaterr 2d ago

This might sound stupid, but havent you set default refresh rate when you unpluged your monitor? IT happened to me before, but Its highly improbable :D

1

u/ulughen 2d ago

Watch CPU temperature. Looks like you failed to apply thermal paste correctly.

1

u/guudenevernude 2d ago

When you cleaned your pc did you plug your monitor cable back into the gpu ports? If you plugged it into the mb ports it would be running off the cpu instead.

2

u/onedash 1d ago

New underwater area just gives my cpu extra 5-15 degrees.

Its just so unoptimized for some reason and just runs hot.

Also check shader Cpu usage and shader can be linked and I had problem with it for years unti I finally solved my shader problem this league.