Guild Wars 2

… my CPU and GPU fans stay pretty quiet. If I play full-screen, they’re spinning like dervishes. My screen is stretched so it fills most of my monitor.

I’m just curious as to why this would be.

Are my chips working harder in full screen rather then having, effectively, windows overlaying the game.

I love the reference to the first Guild Wars, I miss that class a lot!

Well you should monitor your CPU/GPU usage to see if they’re indeed working harder when full screen versus windowed mode. You can use afterburner to monitor your GPU usage (among a lot of other important things like temperature and fan speed). Afterburner can be found here:
http://event.msi.com/vga/afterburner/download.htm

Ashley Segovia.8276:

Hi Flatley – Generally your fan speeds are controlled by the temperature of your CPU/GPU. When playing in Fullscreen mode, your CPU is working a bit harder, getting a bit warmer, and thus needing to be cooler.

As Ilithis Mithilande suggested, MSI Afterburner is a great application for monitoring GPU usage.

Ah, I see. Oddly, I’d thought there’d be more juice required when not in full screen…