Temperatures and Gaming

atari101

Honorable
Dec 18, 2012
10
0
10,510
Not sure if this is the right thread, but I am really new to mobile gaming and got myself a pretty serious gaming laptop. I just want to make sure the temperatures are normal and more importantly, healthy for long-term use.

I have an Alienware M14x
3rd generation Intel® Core™ i5-3210M processor (3MB Cache, up to 3.1GHz w/Turbo Boost 2.0)
6GB DDR3 at 1600MHz
1 GB GDDR5 NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 650M with Optimus™

I am running CPUID Hardware Monitor
I have a Belkin Laptop cooling pad

I am mostly playing Far Cry 3, I play at medium settings with capped resolution for my laptop (1366x768). The game runs at 30-50 fps (and looks fantastic to boot). I had to adjust the settings to run the game off the Nvidia GPU over the integrated chipset, it was running awful (10-15 fps).

After 1-2 hours of gaming my CPU heats up to 60 Celsius, highest I have seen is 80 Celsius.
I have never seen the GPU above 70 Celsius

Is this normal? I have stuck with playing for 2 hours or so, take a break and do something productive, come back for my gaming. Thanks, really loving my laptop and want to make sure I am taking good care of it!