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Yesterday I have cleaned a gaming laptop. Liam from Woodbridge called and said that his laptop overheats and shut itself down after about 2 hours of intensive graphic game.
He had a custom gaming laptop from www.pcspecialist.co.uk with a powerful I7 intel processor, 16 GB DDR3 RAM, and an AMD Radeon HD 7970M (2 GB DDR5) crossfire graphic card. I was quite impressed with the accessibility of the case. Normally one has to dissemble almost to the bone a laptop to gain good access to the CPU, GPU. With this one it was a pleasant experience. 4 screws to slide the lid out and you have access to the fans and to the heatsinks. One fan had 3 screws and the other 4 screws.
The laptop was about 1 year old and haven't been properly clean. Liam said that he blew some compreseed air over the heatsink.
3 Simple tips for overheating laptops.
- Don't blow compressed air over the heatsink from outside of the case.
Doing so you will just push the dust inside the laptop making even worst.
- Have your laptop cleaned at least once a year.
It is incredible what our laptops can gather inside. You have to understand why people advertise a pet free house when they are selling things on ebay. Most of the hair ends up in your laptop. Now imagine your hair (even worst if you have long hair) along with a cat or dog hair cooking slowly inside your laptop. No wander it can reach to 70 degrees and it shuts itself down to protest working in such environment.
- Don't push it more than you should.
Remember laptops are very tight and there is not a lot of air to flow around in laptop case too cool it down. Let's say you bought a laptop, installed a game and it was working as a charm. But meanwhile you had installed a lot of "cool apps" and tiny programs (toolbars, skype, desktop widgets, java, utorrent etc.) and from an average of 45 processes running you end up with about 95. You could say that your processor can handle it and that you have plenty of RAM. In my opinion all these processes are mounting up when you are looking to do some gaming or run some intensive programs, these add up and can push your computer more than is needed.
If your laptop gets too hot doing the most comon user activities like browsing the internet, listening music, watching movies, word processing, then is definitely time to have it checked.
Especially for gamers:
Your laptop is getting to hot although you have it cleaned? You have bought a cooler to put it under it and still doesn't help?
Maybe is time to drop some of the quality of the graphics in the game or your "fps". The AMD Radeon HD 7970M that I was talking about earlier has a power consumption of 200W that means a lot of heat and the speed of a processor drops with rise of temperature. For every volt the temperature rise exponentially. This is why a part of a serious over-clocking is to reduce voltage. So, for some of you that you think you know what you're doing, you could play with the BIOS voltage settings. Just ask yourselves this: Is it really worth frying your precious laptop for a game? "Fry it" and you won't play any.
Why overheating is dangerous:
Interior of your computer can get so hot that some important parts can de-solder and then you can say "bye-bye" to your laptop or try a expensive and not always reliable repair.