Temperature Check

Don't read the forums.  How many times have I been told that?  How many bloggers have written that?  But I do it anyway.  The latest case: how Incarna makes graphics cards overheat.

The thread I read (that I can't find now) stated a problem with the graphics card overheating when attempting to play with two clients.  CCP Zulu did come out with a dev blog addressing the issue (kind of) but a lot of people in the thead started spouting off the specs of their machines complaining about overheating.  One of the specs caught my eye: a year-old laptop running an NVIDIA GeoForce GT 425M card.  That's what I run.

The thing that really irritated me about the thread wasn't the people reporting the issues.  Oh no!  It was the responses that you are not supposed to stay docked up in stations.  Really?  What game are they playing?  If we aren't supposed to stay in stations, why do we have all of these cool new interfaces that encourage us to stay in stations?  Obviously, those people were either trolls or people who never engage in planetary interaction.  Or any kind of industry for that matter.  Either that, or I'm really slow.  I'm okay with being slow, because I'm getting older and my twitch relexes just aren't what they used to be.  Besides, Eve is a sandbox and I'll play at whatever speed I want.

So after downloading the new client, I logged both my accounts on.  I dual box, and I actually run two computers, a laptop and a desktop.  But for last night, my mission was simple: find out if staying docked up in station would overheat my graphics cards.  That actually was not a hardship, since I did want to explore the interior of the Captain's Quarters. 

The performance was much better than that first look I took when CQ first showed up on Duality.  And I actually entered the character creator on both characters and changed the looks around.  Wandering Rose is now wearing all black and Rosewalker had gotten rid of his dreadlocks and now is sporting corn rolls and a new tatoo.  The funny thing about the character creator is that the mirror on the exterior of the character creator did not work on my laptop but did on my desktop.  The reason that is funny is that while my laptop is running an NVIDIA card, my desktop is running a ATI Radeon 4800 Series graphics card.  Less functionality with an NVIDIA card, CCP's graphics partner?  Even after the patch notes stated they were shutting off some functionality Starting to sound like SOE and EverQuest 2 to me.


I stayed logged in for about an hour, also doing my planetary interaction activities from the CQ, before going to sleep.  No overheating noted on either computer, although I will look into getting a cooling pad just to make sure my laptop stays cool during longer periods of ship spinning.  What's that?  No more ship spinning?  If you look at your ship long enough, you will notice your ship will slowly rotate all on its own.  Hopefully that is an intended feature.  I'd hate for CCP to think I created a bot to do that.