Game makes laptop HOT

[LarryP]

I play a lot of games on my laptop and usually the real time strategy games keep the fan on the longest. However, WW2-ToW keeps the laptop hotter than any game I have played.

Anyone else notice this?

[Anthropoid]

Pretty sure they do that more and more as they age too. I'd suggest one of those laptop fans to help cool it, but in my experience they also wear out pretty fast.

[LarryP]

This is a new laptop, a Dell 1540 Inspiron:
Dual core 2.54 gig
4 gigs ram
Vista Home Premium
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4330 (512 megs vram)
300 gig HD
Excellent fan system

Nothing running in the background and everything is optimized, like chkdsk, defragged, etc..

It runs this game hotter by far than any other game and I play a lot on this. A wide variety.

[Severian]

It's wierd. On my laptop:
Win XP
Dual Core 1.73GHz
1GB RAM
Integrated Grahpic Card
80GB HDD
There is no problems with cooling when I'm playing ToW...

[Anthropoid]

ORIGINAL: LarryP

This is a new laptop, a Dell 1510 Inspiron:
4 gigs ram
Vista Home Premium
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4330 (512 megs vram)
300 gig HD
Excellent fan system

Nothing running in the background and everything is optimized, like chkdsk, defragged, etc..

It runs this game hotter by far than any other game and I play a lot on this. A wide variety.

That sounds like a pretty solid rig. I sure ain't no hardware expert by any means, but I've tried to learn a bit from my online buddies. Only thing I would guess could be doing it, and I could be totally wrong: power supply on your laptop might be small? Front serial bus is another bottleneck on the chip-mobo connection that rarely gets mentioned when they sometimes sell you some 'hot' new fast cpu, though I don't know if that would cause more spinning and thus more heat and fan.

It seems pretty obvious that the game is causing lots of calculations and so more heat . . . maybe it is software specific? Wish i could be more helpful; that stuff is very annoying. [:@]

[doomtrader]

Most probably it's GPU issue.

On my desktop I've got ATI X1950Pro and it's spinning like a crazy, my son has got Nvida 8800GT and it's all quiet.

[Zakhal]

ORIGINAL: doomtrader

Most probably it's GPU issue.

On my desktop I've got ATI X1950Pro and it's spinning like a crazy, my son has got Nvida 8800GT and it's all quiet.

IIRC x1950 pro had a fan that always run at very high speeds. 8800GT was never a top model so its fan didnt need to run at such speeds.

My gtx280 is a bit noisy on default settings if really taxed but I used rivatuner to set the fan-speed according to coretemp and now its pretty silent and with decent temps.

[doomtrader]

IIRC x1950 pro had a fan that always run at very high speeds. 8800GT was never a top model so its fan didnt need to run at such speeds.

I took another look at my son's computer specs and the GPU is so silent because it's with Silent Pipe [:D]

[Erik Rutins]

Doesn't run hot on my laptop either - have you checked to see if you have a dust build-up? Last time my laptop started getting hot while gaming, cleaning out the dust in the GPU fan/filter area solved that problem. Other than that, maybe this is just more demanding than other games you've run - but it doesn't really make my laptop break much of a sweat.

[SlickWilhelm]

Yes, with ToW installed and running, that beautiful map makes my laptop looks positively smokin' hot!

Oh, you mean hot as in temperature? Nevermind! [:D]

[LarryP]

ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

Doesn't run hot on my laptop either - have you checked to see if you have a dust build-up? Last time my laptop started getting hot while gaming, cleaning out the dust in the GPU fan/filter area solved that problem. Other than that, maybe this is just more demanding than other games you've run - but it doesn't really make my laptop break much of a sweat.

Well, I got the laptop in May, so it's only been running about two months for 2-3 hours at night at the very most, and not every night. The fan has not turned on that much, except for games like this. I suppose it could have a little dust build up. I blow out all my PC's every few months.

I have a few games that make it hotter than most, but they are real time games that are constantly making decisions. I was surprised when this game beat them all in heat.

Does your laptop feel warm when you lay your hand on top of it? How warm does it get with ToW?

[LarryP]

ORIGINAL: Anthropoid

That sounds like a pretty solid rig. I sure ain't no hardware expert by any means, but I've tried to learn a bit from my online buddies. Only thing I would guess could be doing it, and I could be totally wrong: power supply on your laptop might be small? Front serial bus is another bottleneck on the chip-mobo connection that rarely gets mentioned when they sometimes sell you some 'hot' new fast cpu, though I don't know if that would cause more spinning and thus more heat and fan.

It seems pretty obvious that the game is causing lots of calculations and so more heat . . . maybe it is software specific? Wish i could be more helpful; that stuff is very annoying. [:@]

I don't know about the power supply. I would think if that were the problem then everything would run warm.

The heat is definitely coming from the video card and you may be right about it being software specific. I thought this game would be another perfect turn based game to run on my laptop, as between turns there should not be that much computing going on to warm things up. However, something is. I am also the only one with this problem so far, so it may be my laptop. [&:]

Annoying... it sure is. [;)] Thanks for your help.

[doomtrader]

Does anyone with the Nvidia card found the game hot?

All the programmers I know (not only from Wastelands Interactive) are keep talking "damn ATI cards", or maybe in other words, they never used damn and Nvidia in one sentence.

[Kurak]

Try to decrease AI thread priority in game preferences, no guarantee it will help but it's possible[;)]

[Uxbridge]

I have Nvidia. Can't say whether the computer runs warm with ToW since it always does, but I have noticed a tremendous slowdown in everything. I first installed the game on my principal computer, which has XP and where I do most of my work and have all mail correspondence. It became so slow it was impossible to play. Fair enough, I thought, the XP being rather old these days. So I moved the game to my new Vista-computer, where most games with high-resolution and flashy graphics are run. It was better, but I noticed a certain slowness even here. There's a distinctive delay, for example, when moving the cartridge symbol, making it a bit difficult to make a number of fast movements of units.

I also noticed that if you left the game to do something else (I'm now back with the PC), everything was extremely slow. Typing in Word gave a "two letters per second rate", so when I wrote something I could then lean back and watch my own text appear, letter for letter. Don't know much of such things, but it seems to me that if I'm not doing anything with the game for a while, there shouldn't be any activity from the game either. Could it be something within it "looping"? 

[LarryP]

I ran some tests with my desktop machine that runs an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS. Here they are:

Desktop idling temp 131-133 F degrees
RtW 136 F
ToW set to lowest AI 149 F
ToW set to Highest AI 144 F
Fallout3 167 F

I let each game idle for at least thirty minutes. It's interesting that the lowest AI setting for ToW ran five degrees hotter than the highest setting.

EDIT:
I did another test with ToW:
ToW set to lowest AI 140 F

Very strange. Of course this is entirely dependent on my system. Kind of fickle. [&:]

[blam0]

Maybe I can shed some light. Heat is directly indicative of processing power.  So the 2.4Ghz Dual core machine with 4GB of mem and the go-fast video card will be hotter than the dual core 1.7Ghz machine every time---given identical cooling.  Even at idle (measuring heat when fully loaded is probably a more accurate gauge).

Now what really makes a high end machine is the cooling.  It is well known that cooler computers are faster than hotter machines.  Accordingly, high end gaming machines almost always come with liquid cooling systems, and if they don't I'd question how high end they are. The Inspiron is a nice machine, and clearly available with some nice options, but it's not built as a gaming platform, but more of a jack-of-all-trades.

I hope this helps.

[LarryP]

I helped my heating problem a lot by putting 3/4" thick strips under the feet of my laptop. It probably dropped the temp about 10-15 degrees. I also don't run it on my lap, I have it on a tray that's on my lap. That way it's easy to insert the strips too.

This is my first laptop as I have always had desktops only. I always wondered how in the world they cooled them enough. Now I know... sometimes they don't. [X(]

[oldspec4]

I have a related problem w/ my video card running much hotter w/ this game. A vanilla Nvdia 6800 that stays generally under 75c at load is running at 93-94c after 15 minutes here [:(].

I just ran a 15 minute close combat battle to compare. At end of the 15 minutes card was at 68c.

I don't see the graphics demand of this game to be excessive but its definitely pushing my card.

[cdbeck]

I bought an Antec Notebook cooler for my Dell FPS (they run hot) which has a nVidia 8600M GT in it. It works rather well in keeping it down to the lower than 80 range. I may get ToW this weekend, I'll let you know if I experience similar stuff.

SoM