Troubleshooting

So recently, I bought Call of Duty 4 for my main PC after being obsessed with my roommate's copy for PS3. It was really nice the first week of play. After then, it started to give weird lag issues when playing online. Also, while this was going on, I realized that the CPU fan had been running full bore for no reason at idle. I thought the new front fan would fix that, but apparently it had nothing to do with this. So I plainly said fuck it, went out to computer wizards and tried to find something affordable that would work. For a few bucks more than I would have found something online, I found something that looked oddly familiar to the stock cpu fan from intel:


This "cheap looking" cpu fan cost about $28, but moves air around 50CFM! That's an incredible amount of airflow compared to what I was seeing online. Not only that, but it's damn near silent. Loudest it gets is 31dB. Keeps the inside temp around 42C at low speeds.

So what does CoD4 have to do with all of this?

When I put the new cpu fan on (plus a good amount of Arctic Silver) I also cleaned out the dust and reminded myself that the computer only likes RAM in pairs, so I took out the 3rd stick of Memory, dropping me back to 2GB, but making performance go back to the way it should be. Guess what? No more lagging, and smooth gameplay. I'll go find an extra 1GB stick and play it at 4GB real soon.

End result, I'm pleased :-D