Help with Fritz 12

Hi,

I have Fritz 12 with me and I'm very much satisfied with it - except for this one thing. Whenever I exit Fritz and reopen it, I find that the "Permanent Brain" option (which I had unchecked earlier) is checked, again. It does not save the CPU Settings as well (for e.g. if I've set Critter to play using one CPU, once I exit and reopen Fritz 12, it switches back to two CPUs).

I'm doing this because if I switch permanent brain on, the CPU temperature soars up to 90C or more in a matter of minutes (I use Core Temp, so I know).  

All the other features are working well.

Is there any way to overcome this issue?

Best Regards,

Aashish Satyajith

I use Fritz 13 and there are some settings that you cannot set to avoid default.  I would suggest that you have hardware problems with your computer.  If you are running it overclocked, using all cores will cause heating problems.  If it is an older computer, try opening up the case and cleaning all the dirt from the cooling fins, fan blades and make sure the case filters and screens are clean as well.  I run an overclocked Intel Q9450 quad core at 3.21GHz (o/c from 2.66GHz base) on all 4 cores with Houdini running 100% load with no problems.

On Fritz 13, I have to disable the engine each time I reset a new game by using the menu or by Ctrl-Shift-M.  I wish they would add that to the startup option settings.

Hi,

Thanks for the quick reply, I'll follow your advice and see what happens...

Best Regards,

Aashish Satyajith

Aashish 

You don't have hardware problems, 100% CPU usage is reported all over the web with Fritz. No one seems to know why but it will overheat your CPU! The only thing I've found that helps is to use fewer cores. 

rev

Any well designed computer should be able to run at 100% CPU load indefinitely.  Failure to do this is an indication of inadequate cooling by the CPU cooler, inadequate case ventilation, irresponsible overclocking, or (unlikely) poor engineering - most often found in laptops.

I have exactly same problem with Fritz 13. I really would prefer not to use "Permanent brain" as I have to switch quite often between Fritz and other Windows applications and I don't need the chess engine using  the processor unnecessarily.

So I wrote to Chessbase support and got this answer:

"It makes sense that this option is ALWAYS activated if you restart the program. It is the term for thinking on the opponent's time. This is an advantage because the engine often guesses what the opponent is going to play and then has already calculated its reply. If you deactivate this option the program plays weaker. It is our intention that the software always starts with the best settings and this is the reason why it is always on."

I think this "we know better what you need" attitude is just plain arrogance. I doubt I will ever buy another product from them.

I've simply put the engine switch on the top menu, so when I start Fritz, I click "New Game" to clear the board, then immediately click the "Turn Engine Off" box to begin working with the GUI.  No big deal, but I do wish there was a default OFF switch for the engine that could be set in Preferences.