LITTLEBLACKDOG.COM

Posted: Sat Sep 22, 2007 4:29 pm Post subject: Good/Bad temps for gaming laptop?

Sooo, I am running a Dell XPS M1210, its a tiny little 12" laptop, but its got a 2.0Ghz Core 2 Duo, 2gb of ram, and a Geforce Go 7400 Turbocache*.

*Apparently this means they lied about how much memory the card has onboard...

Anyway, it gets friggin HOT!. So hot that lately I have noticed dramatic framerate drops, and even hard locking during game play.

I bought this Targus cooling pad, and while it does FEEL cooler, I am still getting CPU peak temps while gaming at around 93 Degrees Celcius, and GPU temps at 94 Degrees Celcius.

Are these normal for a gaming laptop, and how high do they become dangerous at?

Any info is greatly appreciated.

Posted: Sun Sep 23, 2007 6:40 am Post subject:

I'd be concerned with temps over 70ºC, but then I'm overly cautious... though I do think that over 90ºC is a danger zone. sounds to me like the OEM pads on the heatsinks aren't working as well as some good thermal grease would... that or the fans are a little weak. if it's under warranty, I'd make a complete backup on some external drive and then bug Dell about it. That's kind of crazy hot for a gaming system... they're supposed to be designed to dump all that heat and have virtually no battery life (aka run at 100% for hours straight)

Posted: Sun Sep 23, 2007 8:09 am Post subject:

Disclaimer: I have very little laptop experience.

I to have 70 Celsius as a warning limit. In the desktop C2D's (do not know if this is the same for the mobiles - suspect it is) the CPU is automatically clocked down when they reach 82 Celsius.

So 90... jeez... thats HOT!

For the GPU I'm not that concerned. Traditionally the warning limit on (later) GeForce models is about 120 Celsius. Still, that heat has to go someware, and it looks like the cooling on your machine is either

faulty,
poorly designed or
realll really dusty.

So what to do? Can you open it up? Is there warranties?

OH, another thing:
Try running some application that maxes the CPU but do not use the graphics card at all. Just to see what the temps are in that case. Use Folding clients or any of the myriad CPU burn-in programs that's out there.

/Akely