I use an ASUS G50 laptop for most of my gaming, equipped with an Nvidia 9800M GS 512mb video card and a dual core 2.54Ghz processor. Now everyone tells me that this particular laptop tends to run hot, and not to worry, but even with the dust cleaned out my GPU reaches around 101-104C at load, and my CPUs tend to peak at around 70C.
Even though I haven’t overclocked it or done anything to modify the unit that seems to be really hot, so I wanted to ask: should I be worried about these temperatures? I’m just past the 12-month warranty, and so I really don’t want to fry my poor computer.
I think above 90C is pretty deadly, but maybe they used a special fabrication process on the mobile GPUs. Or not. The problem is an absolute one in the silicon chips themselves, so I’d be :dubious: if someone told me, “don’t worry, that’s what this model does.”
There may be things you can do. Perhaps a utility to keep the fan on high. Some better thermal compound (not necessarily “better” compound, but more carefully applied). Maybe even cutting holes in the case for ventilation. Hell the warranty is shot anyway, right? (And wow… 12 months… some warranty.)
Over 100c? Gawd, I’m amazed it’s still working at all. But if it was doing that while under warranty you should still be able to take it back.
As a minimum use it tilted so air can circulate underneath.
Most likely there’s a dead fan or it’s the heatsink compound (or the heatsink itself) not done properly. There are cooling pads you can get for your laptop too.
I design electronic stuff for a living, and my first thought was :eek: :eek: :eek: HOLY FUCKING SHIT THAT’S WAY TOO HOT!!! :eek: :eek: :eek:
A basic rule of thumb is that every 10 deg C above room temperature cuts the life of the device in half, but this rule is notoriously inaccurate at both the low and high ends of the scale. The numbers really don’t start to turn south until you get above about 45 deg C, and things usually die much more quickly above 70 deg C than that rule predicts.
That said, laptops in general do tend to run a bit hot. If you said your temps were around 60 deg C or so I wouldn’t have been at all surprised. 70 for your CPU is too hot, but not too surprising for a laptop with a reputation for running hot. 104 for the GPU is either a malfunctioning temperature sensor or you’ve got a very very serious heat problem on your hands. If the laptop was designed to run that hot (for performance reasons) then it’s also designed to have a short life and there’s probably not much you can do except hope that you are one of the lucky ones on the far end of the failure curve.
Unfortunately, I don’t think a cooling stand or the like will do much good for my particular laptop: the g51 has a pretty inefficient cooling setup, in that it has no intake that I’m aware of and only one small exhaust vent. I’ll try popping the bottom cover off and cleaning the insides with pressurized air tomorrow, because I can always hope that dust is clogging the GPU fan or the main vent, but I’m not confident that it’ll do much: even out of the box, the GPU in this particular laptop has always done low-intensity work at around 60C and peaked at about 90C. I’ve recently moved from an arctic environment to a tropical one, and that seems to have added a good round 10-15C to everything. >_<
Hmm, turning all of my game’s settings to “low” drops the operating temperature to 91-92… is that any more reasonable for a high load, or am I still likely to completely kill my GPU?
I’m honestly surprised at how hot 90C apparently is- I’ve been playing for a few hours a day at around that temperature for almost 18 months, with no ill effects, so I didn’t realize how close to borderline it was.
Vista is nice about faulty GPUs. They won’t crash your system (most of the time). Rather, your screen will go black and Windows will tell you the video driver has recovered from a fault. You should be expecting those soon…
I think that next time, I should maybe just buy a desktop… several casual searches of tech forums reveal a surprising number of people who seem to have my exact problem-apparently ASUS is pretty infamous for gaming laptops which run hot, and I found a decent number of folks who ran close to 100C at load… I really can’t afford a new comp, so in the name of being more safe and less sorry I guess it’s no more games for me for a while. :smack:
I AM going to dust it tomorrow, though, because it’s weird: no matter which game I run, the temperature always behaves the same: Borderlands (brand new), Crysis, Thief III, Assassin’s Creed, Hawx, and a bunch of others always jump from 60-80, climb slowly to 90, then skip up to around 104 where they stay pretty much immobile until I finish.
I don’t even begin to trust myself when the words “drill” and “laptop” fall into the same sentence.
Besides that, I don’t think it’d do that much good- my understanding is that my particular laptop has really, really weird airflow issues. The reason it doesn’t have a large intake vent in the first place is because when they built it, the hole designed to house the intake screwed with the rest of the unit’s circulation and basically submarined the whole affair.
So I doubt a mad scientist with a drill and little understanding of computers would do much better.
I don’t know much about mobile GPUs, but if they’re like desktop NVIDIA CPUs you can adjust the GPU bios with different fan performance envelopes. You can use riva tuner to either set a manual fan load (ie percentage of max fan speed) or, a little more complex, give it a new fan profile that adjusts fan speed more aggressively as the temperature increases.
You can use ATI Tool to see if the GPU is getting so hot that it induces errors - use the “scan for artifacts” mode - it’s sort of like prime95 for your GPU, it’ll stress it and double check the math and see if it’s stable/outputting the correct results.
105c is very very hot, but not unheard of in terms of GPU components. I had to temporarily use a geforce 7950 and even in my very well cooled case ran above 100c, which is crazy. I’d still be concerned with the amount of heat it’s dumping into the rest of your system - how good is the ventilation on laptop gaming cases?
Edit: In a quick search for info about that GPU, I ran across this guide for cooling your laptop.
(And wow… 12 months… some warranty.)
