Can cold temps cuase bad performance weired problem?

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Please excuse me if this is in the wrong thread but I am not sure if its hardware of software problem.

I recently have built 2 systems up with an idenitical spec, expect mine has a wLAN card (I dont think this will make a difference), one was for my dad. We currently are playing wow, whenever he powers on his system he says his machine is slow when he loads wow for the first twenty minutes of the day. He thinks its running too cold...

I ve explained to him that this should not make a difference to the performance of the machine, as soon as his machine worms up its fine. My machine is fine.

Being my dad he is quite impatienent and it furtrates him when i try to diagnose problems i havent run 3dmark 2005 im going to do this on a coldstart and see if I have the same problems. I have updated video drivers running 81.98 Cats, on x64 edition of XP.

The rest of the spec is the following

580 Psu - Hiper R Type, ASUS SLI-32, 3700 AMD 64, 2 x 6800 running in SLI, 2GB of matched Corsiair RAM PC3200 CAS 3,

Tempreture in my dads room is about 12-14C but when i checked the bios on boot it was about 30C to start and then 38C after playing WOW for a few mins.

By the way if we have teampspeak or vent running the sound also goes choppy as well, its slowing all background apps running as well.

I already have stripped msconfig, removed antivirus (using HW firewall on router), checked for spyware, 23 Processes are running on startup. I havent tried it without SLI as of YET.

My question is - on top of what Ive already done, this seems a strange problem considering both systems are practically identical. I am worried that its a hardware fault but cant see if being this. Apart from running other intensive applications on cold boot what should I do. (By the way if you just restart after its warmed up the system runs fine ) I am stumped! :(
 
Soldato
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Sounds like he might have a faulty hard drive, so it is taking a while to fully spin up and warm up, so data speed is reduced, resulting in poor performance until it fully spins up.
 
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Scythe said:
Sounds like he might have a faulty hard drive, so it is taking a while to fully spin up and warm up, so data speed is reduced, resulting in poor performance until it fully spins up.


intertesting point I`ll run chkdisk see if it finds anything. i run a defrag and windows seems to boot up as quick as mine, it seemed on the surface only when he started playing the game.

In response to the WLAN It is my system with the WLAN and I have no problems with at all.
 
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some systems are effected by "cold bugs" but only when the cpu is cooled to below freezing temps.

as already said could be the hdd, but I'd run memtest for a while aswell just to rule out the ram
 
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Well i went over, switched it on everything seemed fine. Until i fired up wow. For the first few mins we got 3 frames per second. Suddenly everything then shot upto 60 fps, (wont go higher due to monitor refresh rate)

I dont think this will be a hdd issue think this would be more ramdon and intermitant. During lunch I have put his machine in the conservatory were it will get cold again and have reseated and swapped over the 6800s I wonder if one of these is making a bad contact until head expands

Just a thought.
 
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booted up switched on ambient tempreture was 20 inside the case.

With the cards swapped over the problem went away no FPS lag whatsoever. So it was either a badly seated card or duff in some way.

I would put my mind at ease if someone more understanding of the contacts on the PCI-e cards could reply to this perhaps explain how this could happen. Fingers crossed its not faultly hardware.
 
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