Laptop CPU overheating

[radgh]

I have an Asus G73JH laptop, and it's always run very warm. But now it gets to the point where my computer will actually shutdown and not be able to turn on for about 30 seconds.

The air being blown out of the rear vents gets to the point where you can't hold your finger over it for more than a few seconds. The keys on top get considerably warm, as does the rest of the case.

It's scary.

The temperatures, prior to my fan-cleaning idled at 75 degrees, and spiked at 93 degrees (celsius) - just before the shut down. After the cleaning, it idles at 70* (that's what it is right now, in fact) and it spikes up to around 84*.

Cleaning the fans did help considerably, and I actually opened the laptop up and made sure there wasn't dust inside the heatsinks or anything. It actually appears to use the metal casing for the heat dissipation, which explains the keyboard being warm, but it also has copper tubes trailing over to the fans.

I have turbo-boost disabled, it's not overclocked, etc etc. It does not help to run games at low graphics settings (Although probably turning physics down, or things that effect CPU). I can't get graphics card temperatures, I've tried a lot of programs and none report it.

Games that cause the overheat, and the average time before the shutdown (Prior to fan cleaning, now it's much longer):

Dungeon Defenders, 20-30 minutes, even on the menus
Sanctum, 20-30 minutes, like Dungeon Defenders (I think they just waste CPU even when the game is idling)
Skyrim, 45m-2hrs, spikes greatly when in cities or frequently in combat
Saints Row: The Third, very quickly when watching cinematics (had it happen on the first cinematic, which is about 4 minutes), up to 2 hours when skipping them.
World of Warcraft, never. Not even in a 10-man raid with my graphics on high. This was pretty surprising, because I actually lag here.

Outside of gaming, I have never had it overheat. I have not tried encoding a DVD or anything taxing though.

---

So tell me, are my temperatures outright rediculous for a high-performance laptop?

If so, what do you suspect the cause is, and how would I fix it?

 

[cuecuemore]

It doesn't look like a heat problem if the highest temperature you saw was 93C, laptops run much hotter than desktops. It could be heat related, but not a hard overheat as your TJmax is 105C. But if the air coming out is that hot, then you might be getting bad temp readings. What are you using for temp reports?

 

[AxemanACL]

High Performance Laptops often can't keep themselves cool. Make sure you do not play on a soft surface (bed) that will block the air from moving, buy a laptop cooler (one that both raises the laptop and blows air onto it), to help keep it cool. Since the rest of your laptop is hot, and is blowing very hot air, it sounds like the cpu cooler is doing it's job, it just can't keep up. so you are probably stuck using external methods to keep it cool. If you wanted you could underclock your cpu (including voltage, the real driver of heat), that would lower the power to the processor and therefore heat generated.

 

[phatbuddha79]

This is quite possibly the best $14 investment you can make for your laptop. I've bought 5 of them and they work great. It raises the laptop therefore freeing its vents while at the same time blowing air into it. I play the heavy flash game Mafia Wars 2 on it for over half an hour and my laptop reached 41C

http://www.amazon.com/Connectland-CL-NBC-STDFAN-Ergonomic-12-Inch-17-Inch-Notebook/dp/B0028Y4DDG/ref=pd_cp_e_3

 

[radgh]

I use speccy, which detects cpu temperatures. It doesn't show video card temperatures on my laptop though, although it did for my old desktop.

It could be the video card though, since like I mentioned, I couldn't find any programs that would report the temperature. I tried rivatuner, and there was an ATI program I used that I can't remember the name for which failed to install anyway. With rivatuner, I had no idea what I was doing. It opened up a settings menu and I didn't see my temperatures in there. That was just before I opened up my laptop and cleaned the fans, haven't tried since.


What program should I use to read temperatures?

High Performance Laptops often can't keep themselves cool. Make sure you do not play on a soft surface (bed) that will block the air from moving, buy a laptop cooler...

I have it resting on a plastic crate because I thought of this before. The first week after I bought the laptop I sat it on a beanbag chair at a friends house. Needless to say, it sunk in and the vents got blocked. That was the first time it ever overheated, but I don't think it caused any damage, since I didn't have any problems for over a year since.

But anyway, my laptop is designed to pull heat from the top, there is only a couple inches worth of small slotted holes on the bottom which wouldn't make sense to blow air into after looking inside.

On the asus forums people talk about some external coolers you can get, but they always say it's pretty much pointless due to the case design. It supposedly has really good heat dissipation, and it does blow a lot of air out, but I guess it just isn't enough anymore.

 

[phatbuddha79]

looks like you've done all you can. I guess desktops are much more suited for gaming.

 

[fazers_on_stun]

OP: If still under warranty I would return it. I assume you have updated all the drivers for it, esp. video.

I have an Asus 17" RoG laptop with the 820QM i7 CPU and an NV460M video card, and it'll run games like DA2 and TR Underworld and DS3 all day long and not get noticeably warm.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

This is a well documented issue w/ the Asus laptops whenever ya select an "upgrade" over the "base CPU" that the laptop normally comes with..... seems the thermal design was for the base CPU and someone didn't account for the extra load for newer processors with larger TDP. For this reason, while the product is otherwise excellent, I always but custom built Clevo based laptops.

Clevo sells the same designs to dozens of "re-branders" including Sager, XoticPC, Eurocom, RJtech, RKC notebooks, Pro-Star, PowerNotebooks, Origin PC, AVAdirect, V3 Gaming PC, Falcon Northwest, CyberPower, iBuyPower, System 76, PC Torque, Puget systems, Vigor Gaming (defunct), M-Tech, XTreme Notebooks, Smooth-Creations, MALIBAL, Widow PC, Hypersonic PC systems, Micro Express Computers, Jinco Computers, DevilTech, ChiliGreen, and many many more.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sager-clevo/91510-clevo-guide-v2-0-faq-reseller-info.html

 

[radgh]

This is a well documented issue w/ the Asus laptops whenever ya select an "upgrade" over the "base CPU" that the laptop normally comes with..... seems the thermal design was for the base CPU and someone didn't account for the extra load for newer processors with larger TDP.

That makes a lot of sense. It looks like the easiest way to fix this issue would be to underclock my CPU then. I've never dealt with that before, so I'll expect the worse.

I'll keep the Clevo thing in mind if I buy a gaming laptop in the future. Right now though, can't afford a new one.

@fazers_on_stun, drivers are all up to date. Even these awful ATI drivers, which for nearly a year I wasn't able to play some openGL games (Like Spiral Knights, which I heard sucked anyways). Unless I rolled back to years-old drivers, which then didn't let me play some new games at full performance. Also wasn't even able to open Catalyst Control Center until the most recent driver update. There were many people with that problem, and lots of solutions, but I never got one that worked for me. I wasn't able to open their drivers on the first day I bought the laptop! ATI/AMD has really terrible drivers. I'll definitely never buy anything with an ATI card again. On the bright side, they are working now.

As for the warranty, it expired two months ago. Since then, I've opened up my laptop to clean the fans. Supposedly that voids the warranty anyway.


In conclusion, I'll stick to desktops for gaming. This was my first gaming laptop ever, and it's been a pretty terrible experience. The performance is great, though, but a PC would have had even better performance at a lower cost anyway. /shrug

 

[radgh]

Best answer selected by radgh.