Reducing laptop heat
Most effective way is to use a laptop cooling pad:
Make sure the laptop is clean first of all. Remove dust and clutter near the intake vents. Clean heatsinks.
Does changing refresh rate make a difference? Which is optimal? Default or 60hz?
Most effective way is to use a laptop cooling pad:
not really, I would change the thermal paste. I find that many companies do a terrible job applying the thermal paste. Sometimes, the paste dries under a year.
Laptop cooling pads only work if your laptop is designed to use them. Meaning you have intake vents around your CPU/GPU fan. If you do not (as in most laptops, in fact) then a cooling pad is going to do very little for you.
A laptop cooling pad used as a table, more then anything else, will help keep the heat off your legs and help the laptop cool as its designed. No laptop is designed to run directly on your skin or laying on fabric. They are designed to run on a flat surface.
There are a few OS level tricks you ckittene to reduce the Heat in your Laptop, but they all reduce the performance of your CPU/GPU to some point. In your power settings, the advanced settings for your current power profile, you can set the CPU power settings for min/max on batter and plugged in. I find that setting the min to 0% and the max to 90% has more effect to keeping your laptop cool then anything else.
That does 2 things.
1. disables turbo boost on Intel CPUs, however not on AMD.
2. Lowers the base clock by 1-2 steps.
I find that the performance drop on the CPU compared to the drop in temps is perfectly acceptable in doing this. My i7-2630QM will run 83c’s while playing this game at 100%, If I drop it down to 90% my laptop floats between 68c and 72c. Thats more the a 10c drop by dropping the top end clock of the cpu down by 10% and disabling the turbo boost.
Another OS level trick is to enable Core Parking for your HT threads when they are not needed. If you enable CoreParking at 50% (1/2 of your threads) then GW2 will only activate the 4 cores and 2 of your 4 HT threads, effectively cooling your CPU down by not using the additional compute. If you enable CoreParking to 100% then GW2 will use 4 cores and up to 2 HT threads randomly (between 0 and 2). This can have lower temps, but since the HT threads are now being triggered 100% randomly, so performance can take a pretty big hit.
The other OS level trick is to make sure your GPU is clocked at the reference speeds and not using an Overclock profile set by the drivers or your Notebooks Manufacture. I find that drivers supplied by AMD/Nvidia can somtimes OC your Clock on the core of your GPU. While this can give a performance boost it will also create alot of extra heat that really is uncessary in a laptop environment. After installing/updating drivers I ALWAYS double check the GPU clocks with GPU-Z and make sure they are set to reference specs. If they are not, then I’ll use MSI Afterburner to underclock the GPU down to them.
Hardware mods that you can do to your laptop (Once its out of warranty)
1. drill vent holes right where the CPU/GPU fan would normally intake fresh air (I use a 1/16th drill bit to do this) in a honey comb pattern. A more advanced method would be to drill a circle and install a vent screen with putty so that the air intake is even less. This opens up that area so the Fan can take in more air, thus cooling down the Heatpipes faster.
Reference Link for Pics – http://www.overclock.net/t/1406016/modding-the-hp-dv6-laptop-model-6199-to-reduce-the-high-temperature
2. remove the internal Heatsink/Fan kit, polish the Copper shim area on the Heatsink, clean off the surface of the DIE of your CPU/GPU and use a non-conductive Thermal Paset (TIM) such as IC7-Diamond to increase the heat transfer effectiveness between the CPU/GPU and your heatsink.
And thats about it in a nutshell.
Desktop: 4790k@4.6ghz-1.25v, AMD 295×2, 32GB 1866CL10 RAM, 850Evo 500GB SSD
Laptop: M6600 – 2720QM, AMD HD6970M, 32GB 1600CL9 RAM, Arc100 480GB SSD
Laptop: M6600 – 2720QM, AMD HD6970M, 32GB 1600CL9 RAM, Arc100 480GB SSD