What should I do?
- Buy thermal gel and compressed air.
- Open up your laptop.
- Clean your fans.
- Clean the thermal gel off the CPU and GPU with ethanol.
- Reapply thermal gel, see Youtube for technique.
- Close it up.
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I did that a lot of times... there is ZERO dust inside, Lenovo laptops are really high quality.
Also, I can't find the freaking GPU, it's somewhere in there, it's more of a puzzle than my puzzle here.
Edit: I'll check the thermal gel stuff after the exams :D
By the way, my GPU is 80C, but there is no heat on the surface, absolutely none.
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You sure the fan is not dead? You sure you have actually SEEN the fan?
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The fan is alive and kicking at full speed whenever needed, it's near the microphone, it blocks gaming with Skype on :(
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You sure it's blowing out air at full speed? Sounds does not equal function.
You really should clean it out with compressed air.
Sorry if I sound condescending, but I had similar experience with my 4-year old. Cleaning the fans absolutely helped.
And yeah, definitely read up on the whole thermal gel stuff.
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I'll read on the thermal gel. It is definitely blowing anything on the left side of the table right off whenever I open a game.
Just tried CS:GO on Intel HD graphics. Same fps, but it's the first time I notice aliasing so bad in a game... at least it doesn't look like a potato, TF2 looks like a potato with integrated graphics :D
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You sure it's blowing out air at full speed? Sounds does not equal function.
In fact, it could indicate the exact opposite. If the fan isn't spinning properly it can be noisier than usual.
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I should buy an SSD. These units run cooler than hard drives, so your CPU and GPU will run cooler too. And with this solution you will get rid of the bottleneck too, because 2.5 inches (laptop) hard drives are slower than desktop ones (3.5 inches). You can use your HDD as an external one via USB and a case.
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I also thought about that, but I was thinking I would get the max performance if I plug them on a USB 3.0 port, which this laptop does not have.
I COULD buy an SSD to replace the hard drive and use an external 1TB drive for bigger storage.
I am really held off from buying additional parts for this laptop, though, since the Pentium is really outdated for games right now, but I'm not sure I'll have money for a better one for another year...
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The problem with laptops is essentialy the heat spread by the HDD. A laptop hard drive can reach 50º celsius or more, and that is a lot of temperature for such a small case with a lot of components inside. I'm talking about my own experience, the SSD is the best purchase I have made. The speed is also unbelievable :)
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You seriously underestimate my power to use the memory hard enough to make an microSD card melt :D
Thanks, I'll see about the SSD, I'm getting old, I don't even have one...
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While it's true that SSDs run cooler than HDDs, the heat distrubuted from an HDD to the other components, is not considerable. Usually, the HDD is far away (and has it's own fitting in a laptop case) from GPU/CPU, it doesn't affect their temperature much, because the airflow of the laptop doesn't touch the hdd - the heat distributes to anywhere from the HDD, mostly going upwards and dissolving into the air of the room. In cases where CPU/GPU are really close to the HDD, it can affect these temperatures a little (just a little, as in about 2-3°C celsius) which can't quite be used as an argument to buy an ssd and replace the hard drive.
In any way, I'm always a supporter of SSDs in general, as they break less (unless you buy OCZ, huehuehue) and they also don't break when thrown on the floor - i.e. clumsy user accidentaly throws his laptop on the floor or carries it around the city a lot, which can also have an impact on the fragile mechanical parts.
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Of course, heat distribution is important and it depends on the design of the laptop case. My laptop was badly designed in my opinion so the heat spread badly to the rest of the components. In my case I got 20 degrees lower temperatures for both CPU and GPU.
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ouch, lol. Talk about a bad case design, although in technical testing and maintenance I've also seen some hard drives go upwards of a temperature of 40°C, which is quite unhealthy, as hard drives 1) shouldn't technically be able to go upward of these temperatures, at least not as long as the outside temperature is equally high and 2) usually operate around 30 - 35°C regardless. As to why these HDDs did that, I don't have a clue, they were mostly broken ones anyway (loads of smart errors, for instance)
In my case (Sony Vaio SVS13 Pro) switching from an HDD to an SSD had no effect - the CPU capped at 72°C at full load with the HDD; same with the SSD (whilst testing the CPU both HDD and SSD were also put to maximum power consumption thus heat, through letting them write at 100%)
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My laptop hard drive was way above 50ºC and it was perfect (0 reallocated sectors and passed all the SMART tests). But it was transfering a lot of heat to the internal parts.
The CPU and the GPU were 90º or even more with burn-in tests and now rarely hit 70ºC
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Explains it (As I said though, most of them were broken, not all)
I'm not really sure why some hard drives go way more up than 40°C, as they just technically shouldn't. In that case though, good you switched to an ssd.
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I will tell you why: I live in Spain, now 40ºC outdoors, almost 30 indoors.
On winter my hard drives breathe :D
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Try Nvidia Inspector and lock the dps on 60. All working then? Fine only a driver Problem.
If not use check disk
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The GPU is never at 100%, since the CPU is bottlenecking. On DAO I get ~40 fps (stable), but the CPU is always >80% and GPU at about 50-60% usage, for example. It stutters sometimes, so I guess the slow HDD sucks.
Checked the disk too, dozens of times, it's full of bad blocks, but they are all flagged and ignored, this is how modern filesystems work. But too many and it's getting impossible for them to be avoided.
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" it's full of bad blocks"
Replace that drive immediately, with an SSD or another drive, but that is definitely the source of your problems.
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An USB 3.0 port would have made everything so much easier...
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I'll try it, but the laptop is never getting hot on the surface. It used to do that last summer, but now it doesn't, something must be broken :(
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Have you checked the hard drive with crystaldiskinfo for smart errors? if not, do it!
How are temperatures under a full load scenario? does a component throttle? You can simulate full load with furmark for the GPU, IntelBurnTest for the CPU, watch the clock speeds with cpu-z and gpu-z, whilst keeping temperatures surveilled with hwmonitor.
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:(
Hots showed me about 87C while playing... It's below the limit of the GPU, but higher than most of other's
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For one, your hard drive is partially broken and limits the transfer speed a lot! (the pending and uncorrectable sectors are responsible for that, as sectors to re-allocate broken ones have run out) - save your data, replace the HDD immediately! This might also be the reason for your framedrops.
As for 87°C, we a) have summer and b) it's a typical operating temperature of mobile GPUs under full load. Don't compare that to desktop-GPUs! Don't worry there, if the GPU get's too hot (which 87°C isnt), the GPU will start throttling (I explained how to observe this), or the notebook will shut down completely (pre-built safety mechanism)
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Never had it shut down because of overheating, nothing burns on my watch!
I'm now doing some crazy move-a-game-to-external-USBdrive testing, if that gives surprising results, new hard drive.
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I didn't say it was overheating. 87°C is fine :)
Check the external hard drive with crystaldisk before testing, too, before you have two broken HDDs lol. Also, I'm not saying that the HDD is the root of all evil, but might very well be -> good you're testing.
Consider though, that the USB2.0 port and the controller of your external HDD will produce slower results than a fine HDD connected via SATA, but I can't tell what transfer rate is required to produce better results in the game you're gonna be testing, so in that regard, I'm a little clueless.
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282 bad sectors and 36 pending. As I said above, replace it immediately.
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save up for building PC rig. may be it'll take 8-12 months but it'll be worth it.
don't buy new Gaming Laptop. I made that mistake.
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I think I have enough money for a gaming PC, but not laptop. I am going to University soon, so I need something that works on the road.
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I thought about it, but a monitor+PC to carry around will double the luggage and I risk breaking it a lot more, laptops are more resistant to shocks.
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I have to go now but search for something like... outside BOX... which will turn budget laptop into gaming beast. (I don't know if it's real)
hope you solve the conundrum cost effectively :)
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Are you sure its 90 *C?
Mine hardly crosses 50C. I think you meant F.
Btw, when was the last time you formatted your laptop? Over time all the sofware installs/ uninstalls clutters the MFT and OS becomes sluggish. hard disk performance goes down. If this is so, do a clean install.
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No, it's C, I live in Europe. The problem isn't solved by formatting, it's the same on Ubuntu too.
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Hmm.. I would say you have a combination of problems.
- Overheating. Do the games drop frames only after running for some time or do they drop as soon as you start the game? If former, it must be overheating. It could throttle your CPU.
- Slow HDD? Download HDD diagnostics and check read/ write speeds. Also, check the bad sectors and repair if possible.
- Do a RAM diagnostic and see if its faulty.
I can only think of these problems at the top of my hear right now. Let me know how those diagnostics results.
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Well, I have a IT "diploma" from an online course I did a while ago, and I can diagnose and fix stuff theoretically, never trust diplomas for online courses
- The performance rarely goes bad after while, it's usually consistently bad <3
- The HDD seems to be the issue, as seen here. I mostly made this thread to brag about passing my first exam and asking an opinion on what to do, wait or buy a HDD now and to start my GA addiction
- RAM is ok, 2*4GB of RAM is the main strong part of this laptop (except the metal case, maybe). If the RAM were faulty, I couldn't type this :D
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lol.. ok.
All the best with your exams :)
Give your best!!
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lol not going to lie i came for the giveaway but i'm obviously to dumb to figure out how to get to it even with that really obvious thing there
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Check if the fan works correctly, honestly for a latop a 80-90°c gpu isn't weird.
I'd add an ssd, those are great and if it doesn't improve you can keep it and put in a new pc :3
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You may want to try some Google searches about <your laptop model> overheat and/or contact the manufacturer. I had a pretty high-end HP EliteBook, and after 2.5 years its video card suddenly started overheating. I contacted HP, they told me it was a known issue of the given model, replaced the motherboard and everything was fine.
So it does not matter that Lenovo is a good manufacturer, design/manufacturing flaws just happen from time to time.
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Yeah, well, high end gets more attention, mine is somewhere in the dark place where generic laptops stay... It has a 1 year warranty, anyway, so replacing the motherboard would definitely cost me, unless it's sent directly to Lenovo and it's something known. I doubt Lenovo has a service in Romania or my laptop has a known defect, since it's running fine, except for the part about 2004 games lagging, which isn't fine.
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Yesterday, after a few hours of heavy Civ-ing, I checked the temps... The CPU was at around 78-84C and the GPU<60C, everything else below 50C, so that was nice.
I'm just bumping
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So my laptop is 3 years, old and games started acting funny. I can no longer get a stable 60 fps anywhere :'( I'm sad.
Now, I'm going to college, and I wonder what should I do.
The games run, instead of a stable fps of ANYTHING, at a stable 5-150 fps, which is really annoying, the drops are unbearable...
I am now wondering if something is overheating (games ramp up the GPU to about 80C instantly, but it doesn't go above 90C) or the hard drive is pretty dead (it's a 5400rpm 500GB drive, so yeah). Also, the CPU is a Pentium (B960), which may also bottleneck, but from I read on the webz, CS:GO runs at over 100 fps on Intel HD graphics + Intel Celeron builds, so my Pentium + Nvidia GT 540M should be past that. I'm also used to run TF2 at a stable 60 on max graphics when I first got the laptop, even on HD graphics, now it maxes at 30-40...
PS: I don't know if I'll have the money for a completely new machine, so be gentle on me :D
I also have 3 written exams before I finish everything about high school and leave everything behind. My first one was passed yesterday, the second is tomorrow and the 3rd one in 2 more days. I was only scared about the first one, and it was really easy so I'll pass, now I'm giving you some stuff. Good luck finding it (not really a puzzle, though)
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