29
Are there laptop coolers that actually produce a lot of air and make a real difference?
(self.pcmasterrace)
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
29 points (100.0% liked)
PC Master Race
15009 readers
158 users here now
A community for PC Master Race.
Rules:
- No bigotry: Including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct.
- Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
- No NSFW content.
- No Ads / Spamming.
- Be thoughtful and helpful: even with ‘stupid’ questions. The world won’t be made better or worse by snarky comments schooling naive newcomers on Lemmy.
Notes:
- PCMR Community Name - Our Response and the Survey
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It would depend on where the vents on your laptop are. If there are vents on the bottom, anything that isn't pure trash should help.
How hot is your laptop getting?
They're on the bottom. Wh3n Im gaming, it gets up to like a 100c. Is thatt pretty bad?
100c means you are either running at the most it can do, Orr more likely it's thermal throttling to protect itself. Generally north of 85 is the concern area.
I would clean the fans and vents if you can, and make sure if there are vents on the bottom of the laptop that anything you put it on, be it a table or a fan, is solid. No soft surfaces.
I doubt you'll do any actual damage to it, the inbuilt safety is pretty good these days, so it's mostly just comfort and leaving performance on the table. If you can find the fan plates in a store to try them and see how much air they move, that would give you an idea as to which one is worth getting. You could also just point a pedastall fan at it, normally worth a couple degrees as long as it isn't right against it trying to blow in an out vent.
@[email protected] made a great point aboutcleaning and ensuring that there's enough airflow coming in from the bottom intake fans on the laptop. By design, laptops are designed with small spaces, so airflow is really difficult to accommodate for unless it's designed with a good heatspreader, and extremely fast fans that pump a lot of air to the critical components.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned though is undervolting.
I'd recommend looking into undervolting your GPU in order to have it work a little less hard while still getting the same performance. You can use tools like MSI Afterburner to undervolt your GPU so it consumes less power, and thus generates less heat. You might find that you'll still get the same performance, fps, etc., but perhaps your PC will reach 90c instead of 100.
Undervolting is perfectly safe, as when you use tools like MSI Afterburner, it's not designed to override the safety mechanisms built into the GPU. So if you have an unstable undervolt or unstable overclock, your computer will just crash - a simple reboot of the PC fixes that problem and then you can fine-tune the undervolt until it's stable and doesn't crash.
I undervolted my GPU for games like Overwatch, so I can play with maximum graphics settings and my GPU is on average 8 degrees cooler. Granted, I built my own desktop so I don't have real-world experience using a laptop for gaming.
Edit: Here's a good video to help introduce you into undervolting.
"How To Undervolt Your GPU (And Why You Should)" https://yewtu.be/watch?v=eaVp6vcVIts Duration: 9:49 minutes