Gaming Laptop - Cooling issues

Windows i7 920 · 11 Oct 2010

I have an iBuyPower Battalion Touch CZ-11 gaming laptop with the following specs:

1920x1080 multi-touch screen (amazing screen, love it

)
8 GB 1333-MHz DDR3 RAM (4GB x2)
Compal NBLB2 motherboard (PM55)
ATi Mobility Radeon HD 5650 1GB GDDR3
Intel Core i7 740QM (4 x 1.73 GHz [4 cores, 8 threads])

Primarily, I use this laptop for a machine to do my programming in PHP, Flash, and C#. However, I'd like to use it for some gaming too. The problem is, it gets kinda hot when I try to run a game like Half-Life 2, Portal, Garry's Mod, etc on it. The games run great, but I'm worried about my expensive hardware. When doing programming, the CPU stays scaled back to about 900 MHz according to CPU-Z and the temps stay low, but when a game is launched, it gets pretty hot.

kodi · 11 Oct 2010

Not a lot you can do with a laptop regarding cooling.
Get yourself a GOOD QUALITY cooling pad.
Other options are throttling it back and that would not be acceptable

Windows i7 920 · 11 Oct 2010

kodi said:

Not a lot you can do with a laptop regarding cooling.
Get yourself a GOOD QUALITY cooling pad.
Other options are throttling it back and that would not be acceptable

Thanks. I'm just wondering if it is harmful to the hardware or was it maybe built for that kind of heat? It gets to about 60-70 Celsius.

kodi · 11 Oct 2010

Those Temps should be Okay, but that said I would try not to maintain them for an extended amount of time >5-6hours

Trucidation · 11 Oct 2010

60-70C (loaded) should be no problem. Hell, I ran my old Dell Inspiron near 80ish at times. Of course, I never ran it for 5 hours at that kind of load, more like under 4 hours. Main thing to remember is airflow. Sitting in an airconditioned room doesn't actually help that much if the laptop is sitting on its base. Get a good laptop cooler, don't settle on the cheap ones. I go above that and added a desk fan blowing from one side.

I've seen temp programs set to flag at 85C and 90C although personally I've never hit that high. Had a desktop emergency shutdown at 75C once but it was an old one and had a poorly ventilated case so I suspect the temp was higher.