Sudden laptop overheating.

[CharlieKasper]

I have never had this before, today while playing SA:MP my game suddenly started dropping fps randomly. From constant 60 to hovering around 45-50 and then sudden drops to 15 fps for a couple of seconds.

I noticed that my laptop was heating up and on checking Speccy I saw that my motherboard and CPU had temperatures of 80 C+.

I only have these sort of temperatures when playing newer games and even then it doesnt throttle while using a cooling pad when gaming.

Then after done playing GTA SA and restarting laptop after letting it cool down, the temperatures again jumped to 60+ when idling. Since I restarted the laptop, no unnecessary applications were running.



This is when nothing else was running, normally what runs when my laptop starts. Even then it was just over 60*C.

This pic was after I closed SAMP


Before this happened I installed Nvidia 361.43 drivers.
Installed dxtory
Installed ts notifier.

Specs:
Intel i5 4200H - @2.8GHz
8 GB DDR3
1 TB HDD
Intel HD 4600+GTX 860M
Windows 10 64 bit.


Again, I repeat, this never happened and for the first time in a year, I could hear the fans of my laptop spinning so loudly. I am in the process of reinstalling windows and select installing apps but I would like to know the reason of the problem and fix it before i decide to reinstall windows..

[CharlieKasper]

PS Forgot to add, all this time in task manager, CPU and disk usage weren't anything unusual. While on SA:MP CPU usage was ~10% and when idle CPU usage was 0-3%

[Leroy_Kolta]

Rollback your Nvidia drivers and see what happens. Should be a simple process. Once you rollback, reboot your laptop a few times and then check back in on where your temperatures are at.

[CharlieKasper]

Rollback your Nvidia drivers and see what happens. Should be a simple process. Once you rollback, reboot your laptop a few times and then check back in on where your temperatures are at.

I will try this. Previous I had 355.98, I will download that and let you know.

[Gandalf]

Even when you do not hear the cooler it is running. Check for dust.

[Devin]

What surface did you have the laptop on when playing?

[CharlieKasper]

Even when you do not hear the cooler it is running. Check for dust.

I did take the extra step and got rid of the dust inside (although there was barely any). However, the dust filter (which was quite full of dust itself) had too many threads (don't know exactly what it's called) loose and I thought may be it could be clogging the fans (since they were touching the fan. I got a beard trimmer and trimmed away those loose ends.

What surface did you have the laptop on when playing?

I was on bed and using it on a pillow, however I was using the cooling pad so there was enough airflow. I have played like that before and never had this issue. Everything I was doing yesterday while it started heating had been done before to no heating problems


I reinstalled windows and rolled back to 355.98 version of Nvidia Drivers. There's no heating issue (yet). I guess this thread can be closed. I will make another one if it happens again.

Thanks for the help!

[Leroy_Kolta]

Cool cool.

Glad we could help.

[TheRock]

There's no need to make another thread for it, once confirmed that it was caused by drivers let us know.

I've heard GPU Overheating driver update issues before, but never on a laptop.. Make sure to clean it's fans..

[CharlieKasper]

The GPU itself never goes above 45-50*C when playing. The CPU and motherboard temperatures however touch the ceiling when operating. However, when I did a test, it didn't give high temperatures .l,

I thought it to be dxtory giving those temperatures at first.

Idling it gave CPU - 45*C. Motherboard - 44*C, GPU - 37*C.

Running SA:MP it gave CPU - 58*C. Motherboard - 59*C, GPU - 48*C.

Running SA:MP with dxtory it gave CPU - 63*C. Motherboard - 65*C, GPU - 53*C.

Running SA:MP dxtory recording (for over 1 min, resulting file was 4 GB) it gave CPU - 66*C. Motherboard - 67*C, GPU - 49*C.

Now I don't know if these temperatures are good while playing SA:MP cause I have never tested before.. If anybody can confirm its good or bad, it would be nice.
All these were done while laptop power settings were in 'Balanced' (min 5% and max 50% power state).

EDIT: Running SA:MP with dxtory recording at High Performance setting - CPU - 73, Motherboard - 75 (90*C for a split second and back to 75), GPU - 50

Moving on, there's another thing I noticed that when I am in "High Performance" setting (in which the minimum and maximum CPU power state are 100% when plugged in), the temperatures exceeded 75*C (I wasn't able to check if they touched 80-90 range).

[Fuzzy]

Those temps are very good, even 80's to 90's are acceptable for (gaming) laptops.