I recently purchased a laptop, Acer Aspire 5741G Intel Core i3-350M (2.26Ghz 3mb L3) Geforce gt 320M 1G 4gb DDR3 Windows 7 I thought Starcraft 2 would run fine, and it does at the beginning, even with graphics on high, but after 30-45min it starts getting choppy, specially in custom games with many players. I was very surprised as my old desktop (which is absolutely inferior in everything, runs on vista and has a 256mb gpu, only the cpu is better as far as I know: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300), with every setting on low runs the game absolutely fine. I tryed turning every setting down (sound and 3d setting outside of the game included), not sure it helped the slightest. I tryed the nvidia fix, but that only seems to help with the battlenet UI (which runs much smoother and doesn't heat the system) I bought a laptop base with 2 fans, it did seem to help, but after 45min + or several games in a row it seems to get choppy again. After a lot of reading around, I think my bottleneck is the cpu here. Can someone confirm if the cpu is enough to play the game properly? Or should I stick to 2v2 game in the future on this system? ;s edit - after even more reading around, the cpu is supposed to be more than enough, and the gpu should be able to handle the game on medium (but struggles with the lowest settings as soon as there too many units around..) Why is it running so much worse than on my old desktop? -__-
bump + update I've tryed all the fixs I could find so far, from tweaking and lowering the variables.txt file, starting Starcraft 2 through steam, updating all my drivers, updating BIOS, trying different GPU drivers (altough my gpu seems to have very few releases, all of them pretty new)..... The only thing that seems to have helped is removing the framerate cap from variables and turning vsynch off. My fps have been as high as 100+, altough they usually drop as the game progresses, sometimes slowing down to 10 fps or under in long games. Reparing the game also seems to help... for the first game or 2 -_- I've mostly tested my fps on Sotis (dota like map), as it usually has quite a few units interacting all game long, averages on 70fps at start, usually drops to 40-50 fps after 10 mins, and averages 20 fps (and gets lower if there are a LOT of units fighting or someone uses a nuke) EDIT For some reasonmy last post isn't showing (I did get a message saying it had to be approved first), so I'm editing this one. I've been trying ThrottleStop and RealTemp to tweak how the cpu works and monitor it's temp, it seems my problem is due to overheating. For some reason, Starcraft makes the processor VERY warm, CPU load doesn't even seem to go above 60-70& and is usually around 40%, but that is enough to overheat it apparently? I tryed several features of both programs, ThrottleStop seemed to work better for me so I'll comment on that one. Setting clock speed to 100% seemed to improve overall fps by 10 even on "harsh" times, (giving me around 30 fps with many units in the map on lowest settings). I also incresed the Tjunction of the processor to let it run warmer before starting to cool off (default was 90º, 95º seemed to improved things a bit, 100º crashed the system). I tryed with the frameratecap=60 and off, still not sure which one was better, I think without (game starts over 100 fps and seems to hover around 30-50fps after a while). I already bought a cooling pad with fans to try and fix the heating issue (woxter 1550 cooling pad), is there a better solution to laptop CPU overheating? Can someone please confirm if my cpu is enough to handle the game? Or am I just another one of those people with mysterious low fps for obscure reasons?