Looking for an answer to “How to keep laptop cool while gaming?” Welcome to Roomkit, you have come to the right place. We will give you in depth answer and try to explain all possible reasons of overheating. Not only this, we will suggest everything that you can do to solve the issue. Let us start…
Well, many people face this overheating issue of gaming laptop. Specially the people who have bit weaker laptop and they are trying to do hard core gaming on that. I know overheating is very frustrating as it takes away all our enthusiasm of gaming. Because most of time, it starts hanging, runs slow and even shuts down. This can make our mood really off that might affect your performance in other works as well. Now, how to get rid of this problem of overheating ? For that let us understand every reason that causes this problem and corresponding solution one by one –
Table of Contents
Wrong placement of laptop
Overheating can come from wrong placement of the laptop. Yes, you read it right, this small thing can affect complete performance of the cooling system. If you place your laptop on soft and rough surface, your laptop will not get the needed space for air circulation. Keeping your laptop on your bed can be one example of this.
Even if you keep the laptop on your lap, there might be inadequate ventilation that can cause overheating of the laptop.
Solution – Keep your laptop on a hard and flat surface like on a table so that it gets the space at the bottom where there is need of air and space for its efficient circulation. In case you like to work on laptop while keeping it on your lap, buy a table like set of wood with small legs. I believe this would solve both your problems.
Dust Collection
Overheating could be due to over the time collection of dust in the ventilation filters that can clog the air intake. This will reduce the overall air circulation in the cooling system of the laptop. This happens when you don’t clean your laptop for long time, maybe it has been more than an year. So, what could be the solution…
Solution – Well, obviously cleaning would be the solution. But it would require screwdriver with laptop opening skill. You should only open a laptop when you have the full confidence of assembling it again to the same condition after cleaning. You can take the help of some youtube videos for that as well. Alsokeep in mind that open your laptop only if it has already lost its warranty period. Otherwise, it would be better if you take advantage of its warranty and get everything done at the store itself from expert technicians.
In case you are cleaning the laptop yourself, do it with soft cotton swabs to remove dust layers.
Wrong BIOS settings
See, the laptops fans are supposed to run at an speed as the requirement of the system. If the temperature of hardware components increase, the fan speed should also go up and vice versa. But due to a BIOS update or wrong BIOS settings can make fans run inappropriately and at random speed.
Solution – To solve this, you should look into the BIOS settings and correct them. Either you can set them to default or you can fill custom values according to your need. I have added a video to do that in Windows 10 step by step that you can watch below –
If case your laptop does not have the option of changing fan speed using BIOS, you can use any software like Sidebar Diagnostics, Stats or SpeedFan etc. These software give you the option of setting the fan speed as per your need and also give information about the temperature of various components. This helps you to get the idea of weak or faulty component also(if any).
Weak cooling / ventilation system
Gaming laptops generally come with powerful ventilation system that allows adequate amount of air to flow all around. Even most gaming laptops come with dual fans for ventilation that enhance the overall air flow in the computer. While even if one of the fans stops working properly, this will lead to overheating of the device. Or there might be a case of ineffectiveness of thermal paste that is applied on hardware components.
Its ineffectiveness can disrupt proper heat transfer due to loss of thermal conductivity. Now, let us look at its solution..
Solution – First suggestion that I would give you is check if laptop fans are working properly or not. Either your computer system itself will give you a warning or you yourself can check. To do it yourself, you can observe that the fan is not running at the required speed. Once you give it a kick with your finger, it would create noise or run with friction. This loss of lubrication has the ability to damage the fan. So, it would be better if you replace the fan itself with a new one. Now there is a material called “thermal paste” that is applied on various hardware components that enhances thermal conductivity for proper heat transfer from corresponding component. If this thermal paste has got ineffective with time or due to any other reason, it wouldn’t be good at heat transfer from the components. But it would require a technical expertise to apply the paste at the right place. I would recommend you to go to technician for this and get it done from him.
Now, if both the fan and thermal paste are working fine and are in good condition then buying a cooling pad is the last option. The cooling fan will upgrade the capacity of cooling system of your laptop.
Weak hardware components
Now comes the most important part of the discussion, the hardware system of your laptop. The laptop carries a motherboard that is below the keyboard and above the ventilation system. In this motherboard, the laptop has the most important components of your computer like CPU, GPU, RAM, hard drive etc. That means the processor and graphics card are there in the motherboard that decide how your laptop is gonna perform and how powerful it actually is.
More powerful these components are the better your laptop would be at handling various applications and giving you great visuals on the screen. But if they are weak, they will have less capacity of handling the programs of the computer. And if you apply more load on them than their capacity, they will overheat. So, how should you solve this problem? Let us see –
Solution – See in case you are using normal laptop for gaming, it would heat up obviously. So, I would suggest you to close the unnecessary programs running in the background using task manager. Just right click on the taskbar and click on start task manager, you will see a pop up showing all the programs running currently. Select the program you want to close, right click there and click on end task and you will be done. Otherwise increase the RAM of your computer as it will be able to run multiple programs together then. In today’s time less than 8GB RAM would not be sufficient to run your laptop smoothly specially when you are gaming.
If still the issue occurs, lower your game settings. Lower the FPS and graphics settings as they put high pressure on the CPU & GPU, overheating the laptop consequently. You can also try undervolting and underclocking but that might need some technical awareness depending up on your laptop.
Last option could be to buy an external GPU but that would be expensive. And it’s much better to replace and buy a brand new gaming laptop with latest features and powerful hardware components with great cooling system.
Conclusion
Now we come to the end of this big article of “how to keep laptop cool while gaming”. We saw each and every aspect of this topic like why the laptop gets heated, what could be the reason. We covered every possible reason that is responsible for overheating. And then we covered the solution of every problem causing it to get higher temperature. Although you can solve the issue yourself but some of the solutions require the help of technician who is an expert doing hardware repairing things on daily basis. Now, I feel that you are now well aware and educated enough to get the idea the issue. And that’s why I believe now you yourself would be able to answer the question, “How to keep laptop cool while gaming?“
With best wishes from Roomkit.