Guild Wars 2

I’m playing GW2 on a HP laptop. I’d be playing and then all of the sudden my CPU usage would go really high up to 90-100% and my laptop would start to heat up and then after a few minutes it would hibernate or shutdown due to overheating. Isn’t this laptop supposed to be able to handle games like GW2? I’m not having much trouble with other games. Any solutions or tips I can get ?
Here are my specs:
RAM 8GB DDR3
NVIDIA GeForce GT 630M
Intel® Core™ i5-3210M CPU @ 2.50GHz
Windows 7 x64
~Wade

i get the same problem, i have reinstalled everything on my laptop and it has bare memory now! but try and canle all the crap in the background, when the laptop starts up thats the problem! good luck ^^

-Juk

I already tried from before. Canceled almost every single task that isn’t necessary. It still goes really high and ends up overheating and shutting down. Sometimes it acts like a good boy and stays HOURS without shutting down or heating up. While most of the time it just overheats and boom, shuts down.

Gahhh Sorry dude i cant help you any further, not sure what else you could do.

Look at the fan clean it out?

Laptops are not really meant for gaming due to exactly what you describe. They tend to overheat.

You could clean out all the dust (carefully!) and make sure you don’t place the laptop on an underground covered with fabric, like the sofa or even your lap or bed.
Or get a cooling pad.

Try to clean the laptop from the inside out. But yeah, the cpu will still heat a lot and fast because the game is almost a pretty hard stress-test for the cpu. If you can’t cool it down enough, you can break it. Lucky they shutdown now, years ago they just run until they burn
So a laptop is a bad choice for playing GW2 unless it is one out of the box with no dust in the fan and pipes.

I got this laptop like 6months ago. I’ll clean out the fan and I do have a cooling pad. Still overheats. Shouldn’t a i5 Core be good enough for it?

:‘( I can’t afford buying a PC now

The hardware is not really the problem. It really is just the overheating due to (for a laptop) hardcore use. There really is not much more you can do besides what was mentioned here.
I mean placing an extra fan is not really an option.

My advice would be to clean out your laptop as good as you can and when you’re playing always have the laptop on a hard level surface (desk, table, etc) and not on something that will trap heat and hamper airflow.

If that’s not enough then you might want to look at getting a cooling pad.

Any computer, even a laptop, should be able to handle 100% load of its components without shutting down. If it can’t then there is a flaw in the cooling system somewhere and that’s the first place to look before resorting to any methods to artificially reduce the useage of your components.

In regards to the jump in CPU useage jump: One thing you should know about your processor is that it’s a hyperthreaded i5, which means you have 2 physical cores but 4 threads.

Any CPU useage display will be showing the % of your threads being used, not the % of your physical cores. Since most (parts of) games don’t take advantage of hyperthreading, a lot of the time you’ll only be seeing upto 50% useage because only 2 of your threads are used to their fullest, while the other 2 will be largely untouched.

When an application does make use of hyperthreading you’ll often see a quick jump in CPU useage from 50% upto 100%. What this means is that the game is still using the same amount CPU power, but it’s now shared between 4 threads instead of 2. This adds to the pressure on the CPU and can lead to increase heat output, which in your case might be just enough to push it over the edge.

As said before, my advice would be to look at removing dust first and improving the cooling (externally) second.
If that fails the laptop model must have a very weak internal cooling design and there’s not much you can do besides trying to prevent both the CPU and GPU (graphics chip) from hitting 100% simultaneously for long periods. You could try reducing your GW2 graphics settings and limiting the framerate to reduce load on the GPU and you can also try setting the 2 newly added culling options to the minimum to try and reduce pressure on the CPU.

Can you tell what cooling pad you use ? I even a few too, and some are just not worth the name ‘cooling’.
The one i recommend is a Zalman ZM NC11 (if to high in price, try any other product of zalman.) They are the only ones i could found who blow air on the back of the laptop. That is more efficient than sucking the air. (with the ZM, i can feel the air coming out the keyboard, so it is a very nice active cooling with amazing results)

Thnx for the advice and explanation guys. Much appreciated.

I’m using CoolerMaster btw. Not so good >.<

I’m guessing ArenaNet couldn’t make GW2 make use of hyperthreading ?

Maybe, but maybe it is just a wrong cooler for your laptop.
Check how the fan works on the laptop. If it is at the bottom and pull cold air in the laptop then you need a cooling pad who go in the same direction. You create more airflow, and more cold air is going in the laptop. If you suck all the air under the laptop, the fan will mostly use hot air that just came out the laptop and send that back into it.

My fan is on the left side, pushes hot air out. No cooling fan exists for the left side… that i know of.

Because i have disable all of the background programs on start up, everything runs smooth, that fan is not under much presure because nothing is currently running. Soon as i start Gws2 up the fan kicks in. It becomes slightly warm but after everything is running it calms down again.

Also when I look at the Percentage gage, it is only about 4-5% and it differs because of the programs.

Hope anything can help.

-Juk

I suggest turning hyperthreading off, you’ll get more performance per thread by doing that anyways (unless you got smart hyperthreading), and if not, your CPU is probably parking. Hyperthreading actually makes the CPU hotter when in full load and stress, I know from overclocking i7 CPU cores. If that’s not quite enough, you should be able to regulate the multiplier on the CPU by using something like ThrottleStop, don’t need to mess with bios that way. If you really want to try this, you could try getting your warranty to work for ya, get the fan to be re-seated on the CPU with new thermal paste. Over time thermal paste actually loses effectiveness, more so with cheap thermal pastes. Yes 6 months is enough time with cheap thermal pastes.

Low end laptops will almost always have heat issues when pushed to their limits. And GW2 will push them.

The only things u can do is use a cooling pad, and maybe ,if ur brave enough, replace the stock TIM on the heatsink, that could net you enough degree’s extra cooling efficiency to stop u from overheating ..but tbh, i wouldnt coutn on it.

For future laptop purchases, make sure ,if u intend to game on it regularly, that u spend enough money on one that has been designed to run games and to run at high usuage. They cost alot but are the only types of laptops that will have a higher chance of not overheating.

Loli Ruri.8307:

I suggest turning hyperthreading off, you’ll get more performance per thread by doing that anyways (unless you got smart hyperthreading), and if not, your CPU is probably parking.

I’m losing FPS in GW2 with my i7-920@3,7 GHz if I disable hyperthreading. There has been a bug with Nvidia drivers a while back that caused a severe performance hit with HT enabled, that has been fixed long ago though. The only current game I know of that may still be impacted negatively by HT under certain circumstances is BF3. Of course HT doesn’t really make a difference if the game in question only uses a few threads.
What sometimes really helps (did help me) with stuttering in GW2 is to set the pre-render limit from 3 to 1 with Nvidia graphics.