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Has T4 has been frying my laptop?


simplen00b

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Had a couple of total shutdowns while playing it - installed MSI Afterburner and saw that

(i) the Nvidia GT555M card was pretty steady around 75°, which seems to be OK according to some internet searches;

(ii) the i7-2670QM CPU temperatures were going up to the mid-high 90's. According to other searches, this is not OK, especially for sustained periods.

 

I've actually been really enjoying T4 since I finished the main 'story' (mostly - that cursed contextual button has been the only annoyance). Exploring the City with the side quests has been pretty good fun, but not enough fun to risk frying my processor. The laptop's about two years old - might the thermal cooling paste it came with need replacing? Any technical insight/advice appreciated (apart from 'Stop playing T4', which I'm pretty much close to doing anyway). :smile:

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That is NOT okay for the CPU. Who makes your laptop?

It's possible the thermal paste between the CPU and heatsink/fan assembly has dried and is not making good contact.

My Alienware laptop was at 65-70C on the CPU until a friend put some Arctic Silver on it, and now it won't go over 50C while gaming, and while over clocked.

I always assumed I'd taste like boot leather.

 

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You mean there's been many reports of the inadequate cooling solutions in computers. No game, no matter how strenuous should EVER cause a computer to overheat. If it does that means the cooling solution was not designed within the CPU/GPUs thermal envelope, and the company that sold it should be sued, just like Toshiba was.

 

That's like saying your Ferrari is fine on all 50km/h roads but as soon as you take it on an 80km/h road it will overheat and burn to the ground, and it's the fault of the road.

 

GPU's/CPU's, like the engine in cars, have a thermal envelope which is the amount of heat they will dissipate at max usage. Cooling solutions are supposed to be designed around 100% limit, not 50, or 60, or whatever.

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I always assumed I'd taste like boot leather.

 

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You shouldn't worry though as the thermal controls on the motherboard "should" shut the PC down before any damage is ever done. It will also underclock the CPU first to reduce heat if it can prior to shut down.

 

How old is the laptop and have the headsinks been blown/sucked out? Can you take a vacuum nozzle and put it up against the vents to suck out any dirt/dust/hair, etc. If that doesn't help then disassembling it and ensuring the heatsinks are clean and mounted properly would be the next step.

 

I wouldn't get alarmist about damaging your laptop however because they should shut themselves down prior to any damage being done.

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Laptop was a custom-built job from PC Specialist just over two years ago. It was way cheaper than any equivalent specification from anywhere else, and there may have been a reason for that (especially in the light of the motherboard conking out after nine months - fortunately it was still in warranty).

 

It sits on a Belkin laptop cooler which definitely helps lower the hard drive temperature; not sure it does much to the gfx card or cpu though. I've had a look inside and all the vents look clear.

 

T4 is by far and away the most cutting-edge game (graphics wise, that is) I've ever played. I have played Miasmata, which is a resources hog, but I never had any problems with it shutting the laptop down. Did a test with TDM for comparison - loaded up Requiem, and in the outside at the beginning (where I'm up on the rooftops most of the time), the gfx card ran at about 60°, and the cpu's at about 65-70° pretty steadily.

 

@Lux: I'm not going to worry about the laptop getting damaged, but my understanding is that hotter temperatures = shorter component life. And Captain Tightwad says this is a bad thing. :smile:

 

I guess I'll get someone to reapply some cooling paste and see if that helps. Thanks for the replies.

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This is funny. Shouldn't the CPU disable itself if the temperature goes that high.

 

I can't speak much about laptops as I don't have one, but on a normal computer the temperatue of the cpu may be around 40°C, maybe up to 50° if it is overclocked or the cooler is very cheap.

 

A GPU can take much more temperature however. The limit before it does not work as expected should be around 90°C (that's where I got graphical errors with an old card), but I think they can even take a bit more. Whether it is good if a GPU runs at such temperatures over a long period is another question, though. If they are not overclocked you should be able to keep the temperature below 70-80°C.

 

Another important point is dust. To avoid overheating you have to clean the coolers every now and then, depending on how often you use your laptop. This can easely make up to 20 K difference in temperature on the gpu, and a bit less on the cpu (maybe 10 K, unsure).

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Depends on the CPU, but for core 2 duo and quad and i series tjmax is around 100C. Shut off bit occurs 5-10C above that.

GPUs on the other hand, not so hardy. The Radeon 7950 has a max of 85C with lockup/throttling a few C above that.

I always assumed I'd taste like boot leather.

 

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Thermal problem.

You must open up (or have it someone done for you) the laptop and check/clean it.

It may be bad or misapplied thermal conductive paste; careful remove it and reapply a good one, it's cheap.

Also, fan or air ducts often have problems with dust, sometimes stuck insects or such things.

It depends of the construction/engeneering of those if they stay free of dustballs or if they clog iver time.

Most clog more or less.

 

I clean my desktop pc once a year:

Blow air through it and the fans and cooling surfaces - this usually induces a HUGE dustcloud.

Try to clean everything as good from dust and other stuff as possible;

but don't rub (buildup of static electricity may/will kill your ICs), better use no vacuum cleaner (they can

spin up air fans and induce demaging voltage).

With practice, it can be dine in a few minutes.

After you cleaned the mess out, the PC will not only run cooler, but also more quiet, because fans can

operate with less rpm when obstractions and "dust isolation" is gone.

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Well, I was doing rendering on my laptop in Linux. It is an I7 3610QM and it was reaching into the 90s, like yours. I solved it by underclocking the CPU by 200 MHZ (on all the cores). That brought it WAY down to less than 70.

 

So, if you can slow your CPU down a couple hundred MHz in Windows, that will solve your heat problem and T4 will probably run just as well if not a tiny bit slower.

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--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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if you can slow your CPU down a couple hundred MHz in Windows, that will solve your heat problem and T4 will probably run just as well if not a tiny bit slower.

Wow - set my processor to 75% (using Windows power options); T4 still ran between 20-30fps, but the GPU ran about 66-67C, and CPU ran about 70C. That's loads better!

 

Just out of interest, what did you use to slow your CPU down? Any particular utility you could recommend? Setting a percentage via Windows power options feels a bit hit & miss. :)

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I use a program called cpufreq for Linux. You can specify the max clock rate the CPU is allowed to run at. I don't know how to do it in Windows, though I'm sure there are ways.

 

BTW Linux tells me anything over 87C is "high" and 105C+ is critical. I imagine your CPU is similar because its from the same family.

Edited by lost_soul

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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Depends on the CPU, but for core 2 duo and quad and i series tjmax is around 100C. Shut off bit occurs 5-10C above that.

GPUs on the other hand, not so hardy. The Radeon 7950 has a max of 85C with lockup/throttling a few C above that.

 

I think *most motherboards are set to throttle the CPU around 90C.

 

@simplen00b - most laptop motherboards don't have many CPU options in the bios however seeing how yours is custom you should check the bios and see if you can underclock the CPU there me thinks (first). If there is no option for it than you could revert to using an OS applicaiton to do it. Still, at 100% usage if the CPU is overheating I personally would be taking it apart and ensuring the HSF is making good contact with the CPU.

Edited by Lux
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I don't know how to do it in Windows, though I'm sure there are ways.

Well, I've got the 75% CPU limit set in the 'Power Saver' option, so I can just select that whenever I want to play nuThief and use 'Balanced' (100%) the rest of the time. If anyone can recommend a CPU/GPU tweaker for Windows that's fairly easy to use (MSI Afterburner looks really complicated to me, tbh), I'd be happy to give it a shot.

 

I'm quite intrigued about how cutting the CPU for T4 makes a quite major difference to the temperatures but barely affects the loading times and fps (it's added 5, maybe 10 seconds to the game load time, and a few seconds to the level load time). If I start it up with 100% CPU available, at least four of the CPU cores are in the 90's just by the time I get to the 'Continue' screen. At 75%, they're about 70C tops.

 

Interesting. Just out of curiosity, I may give the 75% setting a go with TDM and see what happens. :)

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I didn't know you could do anything like that within Windows. I've always underclocked through BIOS settings, the text menu you get through pressing F2 or DEL or whatever before windows starts to boot from cold. You get an actual clock speed in hertz that you can adjust (on every system I've tried it on, at least). Shaving 5% or 10% off the number helps a lot until you can sort your underlying dust and/or heat sink issues.

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It isn't necessarily a dust issue though. My laptop has spent 98% of its life in a travel bag and is thus very clean on the inside. It still gets that hot. Even though we find that excessive, it is still below the critical level and they can thus say it is within specifications. Remember that most people don't push machines nearly that hard.

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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I didn't know you could do anything like that within Windows.

I never knew you could do underclocking at all. I had only heard of overclocking. :smile:

I've always underclocked through BIOS settings

I had a look in my BIOS and didn't see anything relating to CPU; as Lux said, most laptop motherboards don't, and I guess mine's the same. And yeah, I don't think it's a dust issue. I'll look at getting the thermal paste renewed at some point.

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