Laptop overheating when gaming :(

Curious

Curious

Curious

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Seem my gaming laptop is overheating.
I had a problem with it freezing after about 5 to 10 minutes when playing games. I dusted the intake and fans and it now runs maybe 30 mins before freezing....
I thought of maybe changing the fans.... but I have no idea of wich would fit. I haven't fiddled too much around with the innards of a laptop before, and my general impression is laptops are not that modable.....

It is a Vega+ if that means anything to anybody out there. I have it on a laptop stand... a stand that lifts it a bit so airintake is better and supplied with three fans blowing from below... But I suspect I need better cooling inside....

If any are up to the task I might take som e pics of the fans and other cooling, wich to my limited knowledge looks like a heatpipe....
 
erm ... well cant really help too much but you could always buy a laptop cooling pad which the laptop will sit on, generally found to decrease laptop temps a little. coolermaster have one (http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-212-1.htm) and so do some others. to my knowledge playing around with the insides of the laptop doesnt work too well. as they are limited in the cooling design they have.

But someone else might be able to come up with something, you could always bodge a water cooler to it but not much point in havinga laptop then :P
 
What are the temps like?

If it's at stock speeds and in warranty, RMA it.

The cooling stand you have is pretty much all you can do without major butchery.
 
I have Dell 8600 that has problems sometimes. I whacked the spec up to the max when purchasing. (7200rpm HDD, Ati 9600, 1GB RAM, etc) Now when in a tough game it will warm up the graphics card into the 90's Celcius. I know when it is about to crash as the on/off switch gets pretty hot. And then the screen "whites out".

Graphics card sits on top of the motherboard chipset, which doesn't help. IT actually shares the heatsink...

Only ever crashes in heavy games when I am using the built in keyboard. If I use an external keyboard, the heat can escape from the laptop better.

In my case, I have improved things by installing some Fan controlling software. I think it was Dell specific, but I'll check later for you. This allowed me full control over the fans. So I can now run them at full speed while gaming. This helped a lot.

Next step I will carry out soon is to make a better heatsink for the graphics card. This will involve using a chunk of copper to transfer the heat away better than the "chewing gum" that is currently used as a TIM.

If you are out of warrenty, it may be worth opening the lappy up and have a look to see if you can improve on the design. Though buying new fans will not be easy.
 
MAllen i had a problem like this.

Chances are its not the laptop getting hot whilst gaming. Its the power pack. I had my power pack somewhere where it would get hot, make sure 3 of the 4 sides are not touching something and make sure it has a good air flow around it.

Hope this solves your problem
 
Nixeh - I am pretty sure it is the laptop itself. It only happens when I am round my mates house when I am gaming and using the built in keyboard. The power pack is plugged in behind me and has a clear run across the room. It also feels totally cold to touch.

As mentioned in the post above, I can feel the actual heat from the graphics card. A heat that is not noticed when using the PC for office work. Also the monitoring software backs this theory up. :)

Thanks for the suggestion though. :)


Edit: For reference.... the fan control program I use is this one. http://www.diefer.de/i8kfan/ But it only works on Dells. You'll need to find a Vega+ equivalent. Maybe speedfan could help?
 
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Dell laptop's don't have a tweaker's BIOS. I assume Curious' Vega+ is similar. So we don't normally get the desktop level of tweaking in a laptop. (Unless you know a source of custom BIOSes?)

Underclocking the laptop defeats the point of having a meaty gaming laptop. :)


Oddly enough I have accidently carried this experiment out once. I was playing one evening with the laptop playing "slow". It didn't make sense at the time, and I assumed it was an update to Steam causing me grief. The next day I realised that the Intel Speedstep had jammed the CPU speed at 600Mhz instead of 1500Mhz. It made the game unplayably slow - and the graphics still overheated and locked up. :)
 
DaveMac said:
What are the temps like?

If it's at stock speeds and in warranty, RMA it.

The cooling stand you have is pretty much all you can do without major butchery.
Click to expand...
a LOT of laptops have heat issues, especially when pushed. It's NOT a fault per sae just something you have to accept as a compromise of having a high performance PC in a small box. The one thing you can do is use the auto-throttle on the CPU to cut performance if things get toasty. This should allow you to carry on gaming.

Also check for and clean away any dust on vents.
 
BigDom - agree with you there. These gaming laptops are pushing the hardware to an extreme and beyond. So I expect the problems, and happily live with them.

I knew I had packed extra heat generating kit into the box. But just getting the CPU to run slower doesn't help. This makes the games unplayable. (Can you remember what a 600Mhz PC was like? LOL Now try playing CS on it.... :))

So as I am sitting here on an overclocking, modding site - then this is the solution that is going to be used... :) Modding time. :D

Improving Dell laptop GPU Heatsink

It is possible that the idea with the copper suggested for my Dell could also help other laptops. These laptops are built in standard boxes, and then we push them beyond the extreme. Ramming too much kit in here. And therefore cooking everything.

Yesterday I saw a customer who had a Toshiba which also had similar problems. Though his was overheating when just using the desktop. Toshiba weren't much help to him. (In fact their advice was the potentially lethal "Point a hover at it".) I saw this laptop shut down myself. I felt the serial and printer ports at the back - and they were hot enough to almost burn one's hand!!

Maybe we have to get to the level of drilling extra holes in the cases to allow for external fans to be attached. I have considered setting up some silent 80mm fans to blow across the keyboard and my hands while I am gaming. This should help my issue as it is caused by that central graphics card.

I was running without my CD player in it's bay as this gave another "air intake" to the system. Kinda helped a bit....

Maybe it is worth running the machines without the cases. Then attach some tempature probes to see where the hottest parts are. This should allow for extra cooling to be applied in an organised way. :)
 
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I run an external keyboard.... The dust thing sounds pretty plausible... Maybe I should just unscrew all the gut and dust it..... For the first 6 months or more I had no problem with the games freezing... Maybe it there is just too much dust inside.
Well, a project for tomorrow maybe... or maybe for next month when I get a desktop. Just to have a backup if everything gets screwed up..

P.S the comp is beyond RMA
 
Think it is dust, I opened my laptop (different make) and the radiator was solid, had to physically poke the dust out (can of air wasnt powerful enough). Had same symptoms as you, but as the main cpu fan seemed to draw the air out the back for everything incl the GPU, it affected the laptop when under graphics strain.

I tip though, its a pain to put back together nad dont snap off the bios battery like I did (first soldering jo for me!!)
 
Could try the notebook cooler, and also have you tried removing the battery and running on mains, some notebooks let you and it allows much more circulation/cooling
 
I opened up the lappie and took out the fan.. And I saw quite abit of dust in the cooling grille/radiator from the heatpipe..... Cleaning that up seem to have done it. I have run crashfree since then :D
 
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