Hello all,
I have a Dell Precision workstation, which is about 3 years old. I's running under Windows 7 Pro, 64-bit, and has 32 GBytes of RAM.
Lately I experience intermittent drop in computational speed. I have even written my own benchmark, which running only the computations typical for my work: simple computations on large amounts of memory, without any IO or graphics: just multi-threaded data compression/decompression in memory. I make sure that no other process is taking noticeable CPU resources, and that everything stays in physical RAM, no paging. During the test I can see that my process takes 100% of the CPU (Windows Task Manager)
Every morning, after starting up my computer, I run this test, and it takes 5 seconds to run. After a while, I notice a drop in performance, rerun the test, and it takes now 25 seconds! Rebooting usually returns performance to the original speed, but only for about an hour.
I have bought a ventilation pad, and the laptop is sitting on top of it when running - does not help.
I suspect something is overheating inside despite the additional ventilation, but I do not know how to verify/document/prove that this is the case. What tools could you recommend that could provide this info?
I'd really appreciate your advice.
Thank you