Guild Wars 2

I’ve noticed while playing GW2 that the temp of my motherboard runs significantly warmer than the CPU, GPU and RAM. If the GPU and CPU are running 140F (ish), the motherboard will be running 180F+. The higher my FPS, the hotter it gets. I find I have to use the limiter set to 30 to keep the thing from cresting over 200F.

Is this caused by a bottleneck between the CPU and the GPU?

I play on an ASUS A53 series laptop. Intel i7 2.0Ghz, nVidia 540m 1GB, 4GB DDR3 on Win7. I know laptops run warm in general. Could it be transferred thermal load from the CPU and GPU?

Yes hotter CPU or GPU or motherboard chipset would lower performance as it will auto throttle down to avoid damage and operate slower. Heat from CPU could be transferred to the GPU and vice versa in a laptop. Your options are limited in helping it cool down. Run at lower fps or elevate the laptop so air can circulate under the base.

Likely both your CPU and GPU is running at max, so any heat throttling issue will just make fps worse.

The laptop always sits on a chill mat and the CPU/GPU are not running at max output. They run tandem usually 50-60% usage. I don’t have performance issues per se, it just runs hot unless I dial back the FPS to the 30 mark.

It’s because it’s a laptop. Everything is in such close proximity to each other that the laptop mobo will also be subject to a lot of this heat. There is much less air actually moving across the mobo in a laptop than a desktop computer. You might try a laptop cooler if your use this laptop for a lot of gaming.

An example:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834997969

You have to keep in mind that the CPU and GPU processors are all directly mounted to the mobo, also the north bridge, all these chips produce heat especially under load. Couple that with the much more limited space and more restrictive air flow and the motherboard will tend to het hotter.

That’s a souped up version of my current Targus chill mat. Methinks I will give that one a try.

50-60% CPU usage is normal for GW2 on a quad core. 1-2 of your core is likely running at max while the remaining core is mostly idle.

Anyways. Try putting a pencil under the laptop to give it a little space for air circulation. Heard its just about as effective as a fancy cooling pad. Its free, why not try before investing something more expensive =]

Hm, I will try a bit more elevation. I will also check the other cores. I face-palmed when I realized that my readout was defaulted to show a generic reading and not core specific. Thanks!